The Soweto East Zone B blocks tower over the older settlement they aim to replace.
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The last Kibera upgrade moved 1,200 households and allocated 691 houses.
Before the current housing project in Kibera there was another one, and the government keeps its record on a public page.
Under the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme, 1,200 households were moved out of Soweto East to a decanting site in Lang'ata. The site was meant to be temporary.
822 housing units were built at Soweto, along with 245 market stalls. Of those 822 units, 691 were allocated to beneficiaries.
Those three numbers are on the State Department for Housing and Urban Development's own KENSUP page. On the most generous reading they do not return everyone who was moved, and 131 units are unaccounted for.
KENSUP began in 2004 as a partnership between the Kenyan government and UN-Habitat. Boma Yangu records Zone A as completed in 2014; academic accounts date the allocation to 2016 and note it faced legal challenges.
What is not published anywhere is how many of the 1,200 households are still at the Lang'ata decanting site twenty-two years later, what they pay, or how many original Zone A allocatees still live in their units.
That last question matters most. It is the difference between upgrading a settlement and replacing the people in it – and it is answerable by knocking on doors in Zone A, where the residents of 2014 are still reachable.
For scale: the national affordable housing programme had completed 8,367 units by March 2026. Zone B alone claims about half that figure.
This story was put together by K N N from material first published by State Department for Housing and Urban Development.
That was a Kibra News Network report, read by an A I voice.
Before the current housing project in Kibera there was another one, and the government keeps its record on a public page.
Under the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme, 1,200 households were moved out of Soweto East to a decanting site in Lang’ata. The site was meant to be temporary.
822 housing units were built at Soweto, along with 245 market stalls. Of those 822 units, 691 were allocated to beneficiaries.
Those three numbers are on the State Department for Housing and Urban Development’s own KENSUP page. On the most generous reading they do not return everyone who was moved, and 131 units are unaccounted for.
KENSUP began in 2004 as a partnership between the Kenyan government and UN-Habitat. Boma Yangu records Zone A as completed in 2014; academic accounts date the allocation to 2016 and note it faced legal challenges.
What is not published anywhere is how many of the 1,200 households are still at the Lang’ata decanting site twenty-two years later, what they pay, or how many original Zone A allocatees still live in their units.
That last question matters most. It is the difference between upgrading a settlement and replacing the people in it — and it is answerable by knocking on doors in Zone A, where the residents of 2014 are still reachable.
For scale: the national affordable housing programme had completed 8,367 units by March 2026. Zone B alone claims about half that figure.
KNN Newsroom is the staff byline for stories written, rewritten and edited at the Kibra News Network desk. Where a story credits an outside outlet, the original source is linked at the foot of the piece.
