Co PI’s Letter: Planning and Policy Team

Sep 14, 2015 | PI&Co-PI letters, Urban Zoo Project

Co PI’s Letter: Planning and Policy Team

The Planning and Policy Team’s work focuses on the socioeconomic and environmental conditions that contribute to the diversity of microbial exposure of urban residents. It is estimated that 60 percent of Nairobi’s residents live in informal settlements, where inadequate housing, insufficient basic infrastructure and services and widespread livestock keeping translate into severe environmental hazards. Understanding how this affects local residents’ exposure to microbial diversity is key in formulating and implementing appropriate policies.

Much has happened since the last letter from the Team in April. We have continued to support the work of the Kenyan Federation of the Urban Poor, Muungano wa Wanavijiji, thanks also to additional funding from the UK Department for International Development. Building on the piloting of innovative participatory methodologies, researchers decided to focus more on food street vendors, for several reasons. The first is the central role of food vendors in providing cheap food to residents of informal settlements who often do not have space to cook and store food, nor time to prepare meals at the end of long working days. Street vendors also play an important role in the social life of the settlements, by congregating along the main roads until late at night and in this way increasing security for those residents, especially women, returning home after dark. Because of its flexible working hours and minimal need for starting capital, selling food, either raw or cooked, is also one of the main sources of income for women, especially those responsible for young children and sick relatives.

But while they may not be harassed by the authorities like their colleagues working in the ‘formal’ part of the city, street vendors within informal settlements face several challenges which can also generate health risks to their customers. These include food contamination due to proximity to solid waste dumps, open air sewers and roaming
livestock; limited access to water – in many cases only available at high prices from private vendors –to wash food, hands and utensils thoroughly; inadequate public lighting and high levels of insecurity that can prevent sellers, especially women, from selling after dark. Such issues require holistic interventions that address both socio-economic and environmental conditions. Documenting the challenges and setting up vendors’ associations that can establish a dialogue with local authorities to develop appropriate interventions are key steps, as described in a new working paper: Cooking up a storm: Community-led mapping and advocacy with food vendors in Nairobi’s informal settlements .

Another step has been the joint organisation with our Urban Zoo partners APHRC and ILRI of a series of ‘training of trainers’ on food safety and handling for street vendors and Muungano members, the first of which took place in July. Collaboration between grassroots organisations and scientists in the project enriches our understanding, and helps
identify ways in which research can inform and stimulate action.

Dr. Cecilia Tacoli is a Principal researcher, Human Settlements Group and a team leader, rural-urban development at IIED.

Informal food vendors: urban food security’s invisible experts

Jun 25, 2015 | Blog, Latest news, Urban Zoo Project

Informal food vendors: urban food security’s invisible experts

One in three urban citizens in Asia and Africa live in informal settlements. It’s time to consider their priorities when shaping urban food security policies.

Njoki places a flat disc of dough on a blistering, oily hotplate. Within minutes, it transforms into a chapatti she can sell to one of her hungry neighbours in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi. It will be a long day.

“I wake up at 5am to prepare the food,” she says. “I have my first clients at 8am and I close at ten at night.”

Night-time means more customers. By then, workers on day-wages have been paid and can afford what might be their only meal of the day. But often Njoki cannot serve these customers.

“If I had light I’d work for more hours,” she says.

The lack of light is not her only concern. Across the global South, millions of low-income people – mostly women – earn a living like she does. These food vendors are vital to the food security and informal economies of their communities, where most customers lack the time, money and place to cook for themselves.

Despite this, policymakers often ignore or stigmatise people like Njoki instead of learning from these invisible experts.

Why the stigma?

Policymakers often view informal food vendors as obstacles to infrastructure development and traffic flow… as sources of unsafe food and pollution. As a result, authorities often relocate vendors, sometimes by force.

When shaping policies and legislation, policymakers focus on the formal sector. The failure of policymakers to recognise a continuum from fully legal to fully informal, means legal barriers prevent informal food vendors from meeting their potential.

Contributing to this is a lack of information. While traditional vending locations such as markets and business districts are well studied, the roles and dynamics of vendors acting inside informal settlements are not.

As a result, informal food vendors continue to be seen as problems, acting outside the law. Instead, governments should identify the priorities of informal food vendors and their customers in informal urban settlements.

A community-based approach

In Nairobi, the Muungano wa Wanavijiji, a federation of Kenyan slum-dwellers’ associations – assisted by the Muungano Support Trust, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and University College London’s Development Planning Unit – set out to fill this gap and redefine policy priorities.

The research involved vendors, their customers and the settlement’s livestock keepers in mapping activities and focus group discussions (read the associated blog and briefing paper). Community members identified challenges that go beyond a lack of access to food, such as problems with infrastructure, environmental hazards, lack of capital and contested public spaces.

Factors affecting vendors’ businesses and food safety, and therefore food security within the settlement, included:

Insufficient sanitation facilities
Overflowing sewage in the rainy season
Infestations of pests
Inadequate access to fresh water
Livestock food contamination, and
Rapid food spoilage.

Through community-led mapping – which allowed the community to coherently articulate their priorities – residents gained a sense of ownership of the area they inhabit and the challenges they face. This led to an informal settlements-based Food Vendors’ Association, founded in late 2013, becoming more active in the community.

The mapping exercise and its results also provided residents with abundant, relevant, verifiable data that local governments simply do not have. This provided a basis for the community to encourage authorities to consider urban inclusion and food security in their policy discussions. It allowed disenfranchised communities to begin building their political voice.

Logical but rare

Community-based approaches that involve people from informal settlements in conversations about urban food security are as logical as they are infrequent.

Yet a third of Africa’s and Asia’s urban populations live in low-income, informal settlements, and the urban population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion by 2050 (PDF). Informality is likely to continue expanding. It already provides up to three quarters of non-agricultural employment in low- and middle-income countries, according to International Labour Organization data (PDF).

To achieve sustainable urban food security, the knowledge and insights from local communities are fundamental. It is time for policymakers to consider these people’s priorities when shaping urban food security policies. The difficulty is that this may reveal systemic state failure to provide basic services or develop inclusive, equitable urban policies.

View this article at the International Institute for Environment and Development website too.

The IIED Report (click to view)

Report snapshots (click)

Promoting Food Access and Livelihoods for Vendors in Informal Settlements

Jun 15, 2015 | Blog, Latest news, Urban Zoo Project

Promoting Food Access and Livelihoods for Vendors in Informal Settlements

Kenya’s urban poor federation Muungano wa Wanavijiji is working with food vendors in informal settlements to reveal their challenges and explore how to promote food security. Muungano is a member of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a network that aims to improve shelter, services, and government responsiveness to the urban poor. The ongoing project is complement-ing other Urban Zoo activities, as well as building upon Muungano’s past experience with grassroots data-collection and advo-cacy. Working alongside Muungano are community residents, pro-poor financial analysts at Akiba Mashinani Trust (Muungano’s financial wing), and researchers at University College London and UC Berkeley.

This action-research project is utilizing participatory methods to understand vendors in Nairobi’s informal settlements of Korogocho and Viwandani. Vendors sell a variety of items in these settlements such as fresh produce; meat, fish, and eggs; cooked and uncooked foods; beverages; and snacks. A mobile phone application is capturing vendors’ demographic and business profile, while base-maps and balloon-mapping (low-cost aerial photography with balloons and a simple camera) are generating detailed spatial data on their locations. Finally, focus group discussions (FGDs) are delving into traders’ constraints, coping strategies, and priorities for change.

These vendors are poorly organised and frequently overlooked or stigmatised by policy-makers, yet vending is a vital source of affordable, accessible foods and a key income-generating activity. Customers may appreciate the convenience and their personal relations with traders; food vending is also a widespread livelihood strategy, particularly for female traders seek-ing to combine work with childcare. As a female vendor explained in a Viwandani FGD, “I’ll be doing my work and also doing the house chores and also look after my kids…But if you are outside [the settlement], sometimes you have to look for someone to take care of your kids and sometimes you don’t have that money.”

However, vendors often face multiple challenges in their settlements like overflowing drains, minimal water and sanitation, uncollected rubbish, and elevated insecurity. In turn, widespread hazards and poor infrastructure or services can threaten food security by jeopardising vendors’ livelihoods and customers’ access to food. But the project’s maps and FGDs are uncovering these concerns and, moreover, a Food Vendors’ Association (FVA) has been established to increase their collective strength, amplify their voices, and advocate for much-needed interventions in the future.

This action-research project is utilizing participatory methods to understand vendors in Nairobi’s informal settlements of Korogocho and Viwandani, with support from APHRC and ILRI team members from the Urban Zoonoses project.

This article has been written by the Muungano team

Bettridge joins Urban Zoo project

Jun 15, 2015 | Latest news, Urban Zoo Project

Bettridge joins Urban Zoo project

Dr. Judy Bettridge is a Veterinarian and currently a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Liverpool, based at the International Livestock Research Insti-tute in Nairobi, Kenya. She recently joined the Urban Zoo project with role of focus-ing on the 99 households component of the project; a cross-cutting study which integrates multiple project threads. This will contribute to the understanding of fac-tors influencing public health risk from emerging zoonotic pathogens in an urban-ised environment and the role of livestock keeping and contact with value chains in driving disease emergence. More info about her to be found by clicking here

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus (MERS-CoV) – What do we know?

Jun 15, 2015 | Blog, Latest news, Urban Zoo Project

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus (MERS-CoV) – What do we know?

In the summer of 2012 in Saudi Arabia a strange corona virus infection was isolated from a patient with acute pneumonia and renal failure. Subsequently, a series of laboratory diagnostics divulged a novel coronavirus later known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS COV).

Following the virus identification, a new case was reported from a Qatar patient in the UK and a cluster of hospital cases were reported among health workers in Zarqa, Jordan. There was ineffable fear that the world was fronting another pandemic after the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

As of June 3rd 2015, there have been 1,179 confirmed cases of MERS and 442 fatalities in 25 nations representing a case fatality rate of 37.49%. South Korea is the latest country to report two deaths and 35 cases in the largest outbreak outside Saudi Arabia. The vast majority of the South Korean cases have been acquired from hospitals with the fast spread attributed to the fact that family members often stay with patients in their hospital rooms.

MERS-CoV infection in humans occurs either as outbreaks as witnessed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where 255 confirmed cases were reported in four months or as isolated cases. The infection’s clinical presentation ranges from asymptomatic to a very severe pneumonia with the acute respiratory distress syndrome, septic shock and multi-organ failure ensuing in death.

Serological studies have confirmed camels have antibodies against the virus. In addition, virus detection by reverse transcription PCR and sequencing has confirmed that these antibodies are likely to be caused by infection with a similar virus strains that infect humans, although a formal confirmation of the role of camels in the epidemiology of the virus is still elusive. Transmission has largely remained human to human with a few isolated primary cases having a histo-ry of contact with camels, suggesting that they are a source of human infection.

A number of questions regarding the dis-ease have remained difficult to answer:

What is the reservoir of the virus, and are there multiple animal species that may form a reservoir community? If yes, which ones?
The infection has predominantly affect-ed older people. Is this related to abil-ity to fight infection, or is it exposure related?
The evolutionary background of MERS-CoV is unclear; antibodies against the virus were found in Kenyan camels during a period spanning from 1992 to 2013. This implies that the virus exist-ed in camels long before it was identified and before it jumped to the human population. Nevertheless, the appearance of human cases in the last few years might indicate some kind of mutation of virus that allows it be become human infective. If this is the case, could it spread rapidly though the human population? If this mutation has occurred, has it occurred in multiple locations simultaneously?
What is the risk of human infection from camel populations outside the Middle East (eg in Kenya)

In collaboration with a number of partners, including St Louis Zoo, the Mpala Research Center and the Erasmus Medical University, we are investigating elements of the epidemiology of MERS-CoV in camels in Kenya to help answer some of the above questions.