ACRC

The power we see is not the final power: What land enumeration revealed in Mathare

Hannah — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

By Janice, Shiko, Obuma, Maureen Oguyo, Calvince Moda, Jane Wambui, Leah Nakami, Evans, Hellen, Ruth, Naomi, Tobias and Stella – Mathare community co-researchers

Before we began the land enumeration, we thought we understood how power worked in Mathare. We grew up walking the same narrow paths, greeting elders at junctions and hearing everyday conversations about land, leadership and survival.

Our work formed part of ACRC’s land rights action research in Mathare, led by Akiba Mashinani Trust and Strathmore University. A key part of this was mapping structures to better understand the diverse housing typologies in Mathare – from simple shacks to multistorey tenements. As we mapped structures and listened to residents, the familiar picture of authority became more complicated.

We began to see that power was not held by one person or institution. It moved through land, relationships, information and fear – and the research itself briefly changed our own position within those systems.

Co-researchers review notes and develop content for the research blog. Photo credit: Akiba Mashinani Trust

Field researchers discuss routes and mapped locations using printed aerial maps. Photo credit: Michelle Nyaga, Akiba Mashinani Trust

Power is layered

Residents often described village elders and chiefs as the obvious route to authority:

“Huwezi change kitu kwa hii land bila wao kujua. Lazima upitie wao, hao ndio entry point, hao ndio authority.”

(You cannot change anything on this land without their knowledge. You must go through them; they are the entry point and the authority.)

Enumeration revealed more layers. Landlords, structure owners, local champions, informal networks and institutions could all enable, redirect or block the work. In 4A, organised resistance stopped enumeration completely. Elsewhere, support from a trusted leader could turn refusal into a conversation.

“Power yenye tunaona si ile ya mwisho.”

(The power we see is not the final power.)

Information does not move freely

Some residents heard about decisions early because they were close to authority. Others heard later, through rumours, or only when a decision began to affect them.

“Information huku haitembei tu bure. Inapitia structure, inapitia authority, inapitia power.”

(Information here does not move freely. It passes through structures, authority and power.)

Silence was part of this system. Tenants could be reluctant to discuss structure owners, while owners sometimes answered even when tenants were present. We learned not to treat silence or refusal as ignorance. It could be a response to risk, a claim to privacy, or evidence that someone else controlled the conversation.

That changed how we worked. We paid attention to who was present, who answered for whom and which questions produced hesitation. Respecting consent sometimes meant leaving a question unanswered, ending an interview or checking information later rather than forcing an answer.

Co-researchers map areas of concern during a collaborative reflection session. Photo credit: Rex Otieno, Akiba Mashinani Trust

What maps reveal – and what they miss

Aerial maps showed roofs and boundaries, but not overlapping claims, informal inheritance, or the relationships inside a compound. Our local knowledge was essential for understanding the difference between what the map displayed and how the settlement actually worked.

Mapping also challenged assumptions about ownership. We found plots with several structure owners, owners who lived elsewhere and women whose ownership was not obvious from paperwork or everyday conversation. Structure owners and tenants sometimes gave conflicting accounts of the same place.

“Hapa nyumba ni mob, lakini structure owners ni wachache.”

(There are many houses here, but the structure owners are few.)

Enumeration therefore did more than count buildings. It revealed who collected rent, who made decisions, whose ownership remained hidden, who was absent, and who carried the consequences. It also showed how easily a single recorded “owner” could erase several competing claims.

The power we carried

Maps, identification letters, reflectors, and official questionnaires gave us temporary authority. They helped us enter compounds, ask sensitive questions and create records that institutions might recognise. That increased our confidence as advocates, but it also created responsibilities: to obtain meaningful consent, protect confidentiality, record accurately and remain accountable to neighbours.

“Hatukuwa tu tunacollect data, tulikuwa tunacreate knowledge.”

(We were not only collecting data; we were creating knowledge.)

A field researcher marks a structure during the community mapping and numbering exercise. Photo credit: Michelle Nyaga, Akiba Mashinani Trust

When knowledge becomes community power

Shared knowledge can help residents question decisions, support land claims and advocate for services or protection from displacement. But data does not automatically become community power. It must be verified, protected, returned in useful forms and governed by the people who created it.

Research changed how we understood the place we already called home. Community-led enumeration cannot make unequal power disappear. It can, however, make some of its workings visible – and turn knowledge into something residents can discuss, challenge and use.

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“Who sent you?” Lessons on trust from community-led research in Mathare

Hannah — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

By Maureen Oguyo, Calvince Moda, Jane Wambui, Leah Nakami, Evans, Hellen, Ruth, Naomi, Tobias, Stella, Janice, Shiko, Obuma – Mathare community co-researchers

“Who sent you?” It was one of the first questions we heard while carrying out land enumeration in Mathare. It was often followed by others: “Who will see this information? Is it connected to demolitions? What will happen after you leave?”

The enumeration formed part of ACRC’s land rights action research in Mathare, led by Akiba Mashinani Trust and Strathmore University. The project aims to strengthen community knowledge about land and tenure, and support residents to advocate for greater security.

We were not outsiders arriving in an unfamiliar settlement. We live in Mathare. Yet our experience showed that being a local does not create automatic trust – especially when research touches land, livelihoods, political influence and the threat of eviction.

Aerial view of Mathare. Photo credit: Akiba Mashinani Trust

Field researchers verify mapped information using printed materials and a mobile phone. Photo credit: Michelle Nyaga, Akiba Mashinani Trust

Being local does not make entry automatic

We are rooted in different villages: 4A, 4B, Kosovo and Village 2. Moving between them meant crossing distinct histories, leadership structures, languages and relationships. Entry was not a single introduction at the start of fieldwork. It had to be negotiated with each household and renewed in each part of the settlement.

Existing community networks helped us begin. Some co-researchers had worked on earlier land or housing initiatives, served as community health promoters, or were introduced through elders, Nyumba Kumi* members and community champions. These relationships provided legitimacy, but they did not guarantee consent.

Trust grew through clear explanations, visible identification, letters of introduction, and language flexibility. It also depended on making clear that residents could refuse a question or stop an interview. Sometimes respecting a “no” made people more comfortable answering other, less sensitive questions.

When gatekeepers open doors – or close them

Village elders, local leaders, trusted women and youth organisers could make introductions and calm suspicion. Jane Wambui described why involving people already trusted in Kosovo mattered:

“Kuna wamama Kosovo wenye watu wanatrust, so ukiwainvolve inakua rahisi kucollect information kwa kijiji.”

(There are women in Kosovo whom people trust. Once you involve them, it becomes easier to collect information in the village.)

But local influence is never neutral. In 4A, fieldwork began without enough prior engagement with structure owners, elders across all clusters and other influential and interested stakeholders. Rumours linked the exercise to demolition or land repossession. Resistance escalated into direct threats against co-researchers and their homes, and enumeration stopped before mapping, numbering or interviews could begin. Because the co-researchers lived there, they could not simply leave the risk behind when fieldwork ended.

Who joins the research team matters too. Reflection sessions identified gaps involving people with disabilities, Muslim residents, older people, young people and some migrant groups. A team that does not reflect the people it hopes to engage can unintentionally reproduce the exclusions it is trying to understand.

A field researcher records information on a phone while speaking with a resident during the mapping exercise. Photo credit: Michelle Nyaga, Akiba Mashinani Trust

Fear shapes the evidence

Fear affected more than whether a door opened; it shaped what people felt safe to say. In 4B, families affected by demolition were especially cautious. Calvince Moda repeatedly explained that the research aimed to create evidence for advocacy, not prepare the ground for eviction.

“People thought it was about eviction. We had to explain that it was for advocacy.”

In Kosovo, some Ugandan residents were reluctant to share basic details because of language barriers and fear. Elsewhere, tenants deferred to structure owners, owners withheld information, and some households refused entirely. These were not simply empty cells in a spreadsheet. They showed where speaking carried risk, or where one person’s authority limited another person’s voice.

Residents also remembered previous research that collected information without producing visible results. We therefore had to explain the purpose and limits of the work, to avoid raising expectations about titles, compensation, housing or services, and commit to returning useful findings.

Trust must be built into the research

Community-led research cannot place the burden of trust and safety on resident researchers alone. Responsible practice requires risk mapping before fieldwork, practical training, visible ID, safe working hours, paired deployment and clear procedures for reporting incidents and withdrawing from danger. It also requires transparent agreements about compensation and who may access or publish sensitive data.

Co-researchers share insights during a facilitated group reflection meeting. Photo credit: Akiba Mashinani Trust

Being from Mathare remains a strength, but it does not erase differences within Mathare or make research automatically safe. Trust determines who speaks, what they can safely share and which realities become visible. Building that trust – and remaining accountable after the interviews end – is not separate from the research. It is what makes credible community knowledge possible.

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*Nyumba Kumi is a grassroots neighbourhood structure in Kenya that brings together small clusters of neighbouring households, traditionally around ten, to strengthen community-level coordination, information sharing, and local security. It provides a direct link between residents, community leaders, and government administration, while also creating a platform for communities to raise and address local concerns.

Header photo credit: Michelle Nyaga, Akiba Mashinani Trust. Researchers consult printed aerial imagery while documenting locations in the neighbourhood.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

Generative AI was used to help edit this blog post for clarity and structure. The revised text was based on the authors’ draft and the Mathare co-researcher reflection working paper.

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The post “Who sent you?” Lessons on trust from community-led research in Mathare first appeared on ACRC.

Podcast: The power of community knowledge

Hannah — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Communities are experts in their own lives. They understand the challenges, opportunities and political realities they face every day in ways that outside researchers might struggle to uncover. So how can communities work with academics and harness that knowledge to drive meaningful change?

In this episode, Chris Jordan is joined by Beth Chitekwe-Biti and Diana Mitlin for a conversation about the role of community knowledge within ACRC and beyond – including what it is, how it works and how it fits into ACRC’s research processes and aims around urban reform.

Drawing on examples from Harare, Nairobi and Manchester, they talk about how community-led data collection can strengthen agency, issues of data ownership, the impact of digitalisation, and the “unlearning” often required for academics and communities to create strong knowledge partnerships.

Beth Chitekwe-Biti is community knowledge research director for the African Cities Research Consortium and executive director of Slum Dwellers International (SDI).

Diana Mitlin is former CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium.

Chris Jordan is communications and impact manager for the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester, and ACRC’s communications manager.

Transcript

The full podcast transcript is available below.

Read now

Chris Jordan Hello and welcome to the African Cities Research Consortium Podcast. My name is Chris Jordan, I’m the communications manager with ACRC and we’re here today to have a conversation around community knowledge – what it is, how it works, and how it fits into ACRC, its research processes and its aims around urban reform. I’m joined today by Beth Chitekwe-Biti. Beth is managing director of SDI, she helped found the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation, she completed her PhD with us here at Manchester and is currently the research director for community knowledge with ACRC. Also joined by Professor Diana Mitlin. Diana is former CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium and has a really long history of working with SDI and their community-based federations. So, Beth and Diana, welcome.

Beth Chitekwe-Biti Thank you.

Diana Mitlin Thank you.

Chris Jordan So Beth, if I could start with you. What does the term “community knowledge” mean to you and why is it important?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti So for me, community knowledge starts on the premise that the communities, whether they are informal settlement dwellers or slum dwellers or market queens, they are the experts of their own lives. And that expertise that is shared over time because of their lived experience is community knowledge. They understand the nuances of dealing with outsiders, be they politicians or other stakeholders, and often these nuances and, I suppose, skills or strategies are often not very clear or evident to people that are outside of that community. So it’s that knowledge that intrinsically exists because of people are and where they are.

Chris Jordan And it’s quite central to SDI’s approach, right? What actually makes it powerful, as far as you’ve seen?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti What makes it powerful really stems from, first and foremost, the deprivations that the communities that SDI traditionally works with, so slum dwellers, the deprivation they experience and understanding that farming out the solutions to address those challenges often results in ill-fitting strategies. So if you look at our world, it’s lit with a number of white elephants because solutions have been developed from outside. But it also is about agency and people taking responsibility for their own lives, and partnering with outsiders based off what it is that they themselves can’t do, but also determining what outsiders and how outsiders need to interact with them. So that component around agency and having the voice to be able to say “this is what we need and this is how we need it”, rather than just receiving or accepting solutions that are coming from outside.

Chris Jordan Thanks. And Diana, you’ve worked with SDI for a long time now. How have you seen community knowledge work within these kind of federations and communities and the knowledge processes that you’ve been involved with as a Northern researcher?

Diana Mitlin Thank you. Thank you, Chris. And thanks for Beth for starting us off on this important discussion. I think from the beginning, as we thought about how to bring the African Cities Research Consortium together to make the most effective contribution to inclusive urban programming, we were really clear that we needed to find ways to incorporate communities and incorporate them really effectively as key knowledge partners, if I might say that. We, as you know, Chris, we’re both doing action research and learning from the action research process to understand urban programming, and we’re really trying to understand the key urban constraints and the urban opportunities in the context in which people find themselves and what that means for urban scholarship more generally. We have – I say “we” very deliberately, as you know in GDI, I’m not the only one who works with SDI – we have long acknowledged the important contribution that residents, informal workers have to understanding those constraints and opportunities and understanding ways to address them. So we were clear they had to be included from the beginning. I think at the same time, and Beth and I have discussed this frequently, we also recognise that as leaders in residents’ associations, worker groups, as they engage with other specialists, academics and professionals and better understand the challenges through their eyes, they develop new analytical understandings. I mean, both Beth and I have worked for a long time with federation leaders, and there’s a process, it’s like, “Oh, now I get what you’re asking about. Let me tell you about what we’re doing here.” So that kind of process of learning is two-way. Local community leaders learn to be more analytical about what are the political constraints they face, what are the multiple ways in which different people in their neighbourhoods are trying to manage local leaders, who may be very paternalistic, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. What are the ways they’re managing that and how can that knowledge be captured? So we don’t see it in a way as simply developing better means of communication with community activists. We really do see it as a co-learning process, whereby we can better understand, we can see the world through their eyes, and they see the world through our eyes and see it a bit differently, and we learn together about what the problems and opportunities are, the ways in which those can be addressed, but also the ways in which that learning is represented.

Chris Jordan And I wonder if you could just outline, more from an academic perspective, how is community knowledge understood? Does this differ between different social science disciplines? And, overall, how seriously is it taken?

Diana Mitlin That’s a really good question. I think this kind of real, you might say, passion, vocation, but also very scholarly approach to community knowledge is longstanding. So there’s always been a group of academics who’ve recognised the importance of understanding what it means to live in informal settlements, what it means to work informally, and who’ve really wanted to work in a collaborative fashion. So there’s been a kind of minority interest, you might say, in this work, and a deep appreciation of really people’s knowledge, wherever they’re located. There has in recent years become a broader understanding of its significance through, for example, work on fine-tuning approaches to participation, participatory research, participatory action research. So this has been for a long time a specialism, but a specialism which has been growing and has a recognised significance. Some of that, as indeed we have done, has been linked into decolonisation debates. There is relatively little appreciation, I think, though, about what it means to do that at a scale that goes beyond the project. So for us, what’s been really important in working with SDI, Slum Dwellers International, is the ability to work with groups that have been networked and federated and who’ve been doing that work now for decades. So we’re not going back to the beginning and we’re not constrained at the local. So we’re working with people who’ve had a level of exposure, who can rapidly come up to speed with what we’re trying to do, we can understand what they’re trying to do, but also because these federations and networks exist at the city and the national scales, that learning is not, for example, confined to “what are the problems with this political leader?” Rather, it’s linked into “what are the problems at the local level with leadership?”, but also “what are the ways in which the city leaders, political leaders, city officials understand the challenges we face, what are the ways in which that’s been captured at the national level in electoral choices?” So our opportunity here is really to try and both learn from community knowledge for ACRC, but also try and help the discipline, the multiple disciplines to take it forward in a wide variety of ways.

Beth Chitekwe-Biti I would also say that for SDI, I think the experience or the interest around academics, like studying SDI over the years, they’ve also sharpened, from the perspective of the leadership of the network and communities, what it is that they see as beneficial or as a two-way process and what they see as extractive, and being able to actually be quite confident in saying “you are not taking our information out”, and then that’s the end of it. So what is it, if you are coming to us with a research project, how do we co-design what it is we want to learn? How do they… there is a term that our federation leaders use – how do you unlearn what you have learned as an academic or as a professional, in order for you to really understand what it is the value of our existing knowledge, but also how you can then ask us the right questions that create that opportunity to then build our capabilities and capacities to actually analyse our own situation. So there is that progression and also that growth that has happened over the years.

Chris Jordan Beth and Diana, I know you’ve been involved in lots of different projects, initiatives, and you’ve seen where this has been powerful and where it’s made a difference. Could you just outline, what’s your favourite example or a few of your favourites?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti Favourite examples. Currently in Zimbabwe, the Federation had always organised in markets, they’ve organised in informal settlements. But the politics around access to markets is quite high in the context of an economy that is highly informal. And there was a lot of ambivalence around how do we enter into this space, because these are things that like our toolkit of how we have done things, will it work in this? And a combination of the action research process around ACRC, so the academic component, and the community coming in with the tools that they’ve used over the years around savings, has created such a powerful coalition of approaches, to an extent that this ambivalence and, I suppose, sense that they would find it very difficult to enter into this space actually did not happen. And I think that comes from that very careful assessment of how do we manage politics but then the academic angle coming in and then creating a level of, I would say, acceptance by the host community – that for me has struck me quite significantly.

Chris Jordan Thanks. And Diana, what are your favourites?

Diana Mitlin It’s truly hard to say because I think each time you see a community engaging with this and they realise something they didn’t realise before, you think that’s the one I really love. So let me flag three very briefly. I think the fascinating thing to me out of the example from the market in Harare is that having observed what happened, the traders association themselves decided to develop a database of the different traders around the market because they could see “okay, there’s something in this. We need to be able to own our own data. We need to develop our data and we need to own our data”. So that to me is definitely an exciting moment. I think a second exciting moment goes beyond Africa, is when we replicated some of these data collection processes in Manchester, and the community in the housing association tower block adjacent to the university in Hopton Court did the survey of residents, they were super nervous, they were very upset when people closed doors in their faces, but then when they produced the results and they shared those results with academics and with the housing association, with Manchester City Council, they also suddenly discovered the power of data. I think most recently, one of the examples of the work that African Cities Research Consortium has been partnering with has been in Nairobi, when 17 individuals working with waste, so people who scavenge waste, people from dump sites, people who collect waste from houses, people who aggregate those frontline collection services, came together and documented those processes, and then when they were sharing with us what happened when they shared their data with Nairobi City County government, who sadly for them suddenly realised that their approach to supporting informal waste collection in the informal settlements of Nairobi was simply partial, that the City Council officials did not have a good understanding of the processes that were involved. So they were missing really important groups. So you begin from all those examples, you realise that data collection by community residents, by workers is important for what it offers to them and their voice and their ability to represent their needs and interests, in addition to supporting learning more generally and engaging with researchers.

Chris Jordan Beth, I wonder if you could just outline how community knowledge processes have changed over time with SDI. Is it still the same approach as when SDI was originally set up or have things developed and moved on?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti I think the principles persist around agency and ownership. But of course with digitalisation some affiliates now collect. So initially we have now three processes of data collection. There’s one which we call profiles, which is really understanding the settlement. So the demographics, the available services, the opportunities and the challenges. Then there is where there’s a possibility of, say, an upgrade, there’s a more detailed potentially 100% coverage of a service, which we call enumerations, and then there’s mapping of settlements, because in a lot of cases, especially where people are living on illegal land, there is no documentation or mapping of the settlement itself. So there’s a key component of mapping. And ten years prior, all of this was likely manual. Now there are digital tools. There’s been pros and cons to this. Not every affiliate uses them or they use them together. The manual processes ensured that people actually visited every household. And so the information collected – and the Federation would tell you “we are not just collecting information, we’re also collecting people” – so there was also a component of mobilisation. And I know, for instance, the Namibians have completely refused to to digitalise that part because also digitalisation I suppose it can lock out people that are not digital natives. So young people, so you now have affiliates who use KoboCollect, for instance, and invariably the enumerators and the people involved have become younger. But of course the information perhaps is much more I guess rigorous and easy to clean. So there is the process in terms of the tools but I think one thing that has been consistent is the component around having an ultimate responsibility to feeding back, so there is an innate understanding that whatever information is collected belongs to that particular community, so that community has to understand, they have to check, they have to own that information and then hopefully use it either as a tool for development or advocacy. So those components, so while there might be changes, we are, for instance in Sierra Leone currently, we’re working with what it is Humanitarian OpenStreetMap and they have developed mapping software that is quite advanced to understand flood risk in one of the settlements. So the new tools are quite helpful but you still really need to go to the street again to have those conversations.

Chris Jordan Diana, what’s your perspective been? How has the technology changed things, particularly when communities are working with more academic researchers or with professional groups as interlocutors?

Diana Mitlin I think it’s definitely been tricky, and I think one of the motivations for SDI being interested in exploring the community knowledge space within African cities has been this consciousness that some of the engagement around SDI’s own data processes, some of the engagement of the older people, has been lost because of the advance of technology and because tablets and phones can pick up GIS, can be swift to record, all that data goes into the office. So I was talking a little bit to one of the old timers in Kampala, Waiswa, when we were talking about community knowledge, and he himself was saying “we’ve been discussing that”. So I think that is a challenge now. I think although the Namibians are resolute in saying we need to still collect data at the very local level, at the street level, in a way that community leaders can then aggregate locally and move up, that’s really quite unusual. And the other affiliates have really decided that, yes, we can collect data, it can get sent to the office, and there it gets aggregated. So I think finding ways in which that data is effectively shared, so the data is available as a tool for people who want to use it to progress their own political agenda – I use agenda loosely, but their need for water for sanitation and so on is important. I think that in each of the action research projects that we’re doing, we have really sought to motivate community leaders, informal settlement workers to think about what their knowledge needs are and to use the space of the African Cities Research Consortium to think about what knowledge do they need which will help them move forward. So at some level that includes the SDI tools that Beth has mentioned, so profiling of settlements, enumeration, household-level data, mapping to understand the spatial dimensions. But we’re also trying to explore new things. So, for example, the work in Mukuru, the WASH work, has really been drawing on community leaders to help set up governance systems to manage sanitation in shared plots, where most people are tenants and maybe one shack is the landowner or maybe the landowner is absent. So how can communities get data and use that data and build a governance system that links into the ward level to hold the landowners to account? That kind of task obviously has a professional component, but for us equally obviously it has a grassroots component. So we’re really very deliberately creating space to incorporate grassroots knowledge in that research and development process. I would say, to return to the way you placed your question, we said how easy do researchers find this? I think we can say that there’s a difference. So as you did in a previous podcast, talking about the experiences in Nairobi, Dr Mwangi spoke about how she had been so excited to work with school leaders and teachers and parents around new ways of knowledge. So we have those who are just so delighted to embrace this way of working and we have others who struggle a little more.

Beth Chitekwe-Biti Definitely.

Chris Jordan And I guess the availability of digital tools is a two-way thing as well, because presumably now more people have access to phones and social networks, but actually once the data is produced, there’s more avenues for people to share it within communities more broadly. Is that something you see happening Beth?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti So I think, especially if it’s data, the sharing of it, it’s still critical that it’s associated also with a conversation beyond just the sharing. But of course methods of organising, like WhatsApp is a great organising tool that’s used across the network, so there are digital tools that are being used or even just like calling a meeting to discuss data that has been collected, for instance. I would still think that in terms of data that has been collected for a specific use, so for instance sanitation, there is still that need for people coming together and sitting through and having a conversation and analysing it and really getting multiple perspectives of what this might mean and then ultimately if it is intended for use for advocacy to advance sanitation, for instance, then that conversation is collectively done.

Chris Jordan So Beth, if I can ask you just to put your African Cities Research Consortium hat on, so as research director for community knowledge, what are you hoping that the process, the project achieves around this space?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti So I think what was really great at the beginning was ACRC being very deliberate and challenging itself in terms of how knowledge has been generated and how cities have been studied and wanting to be different. I think in the initial stages, I was asking myself, we want to be different, but how do we, if you look at social sciences in terms of the methodology for data collection, what is it that you are going to do that is different? People have used focus group discussion, they’ve used surveys, they’ve used maybe researcher anthropology, for instance, immersing the researcher in that process. What is it that we are as ACRC doing that is different? This component around starting from the viewpoint that there is knowledge, and then the researchers coming up with the right questions, but also a willingness to unlearn what they might think are methods that would work and developing new methods. In our last community knowledge workshop in Nairobi, for instance, we found out from Accra to Harare, a large component of our knowledge has been passed on across the African continent through stories. And there was such a huge interest to incorporate this. So how – and by coincidence the profiling tool that I was talking about is really a story of a settlement – how did it start, why did it start, why was it named or what was it named? Because all those issues often are related to either the challenges, the community experience or the opportunities they saw. So I think hopefully, as part of this, we can ultimately create a compelling story around how community knowledge can push the boundary for community knowledge within academic research but also how communities on their own can engage with researchers in terms of what it is, so that the process is not just extractive but actually it is a dialogue and a conversation.

Chris Jordan Within ACRC we’ve had a mix of different cities, so some have really strong, well established SDI federations. Some it’s been a bit more nascent, and a few of them there’s been very little SDI presence at all. Has it been interesting to look across different cities to see the different dynamics emerge?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti My colleagues will kill me. Yeah, there is and in some ways there are both pros and cons, because SDI is very established. In some cities where SDI is very established, trying to then have a conversation around “okay, how can we actually do this differently?” or “what is it that we can add to what we already know?” can be met with resistance, because people are so set in how they do things. So we have a case in point with Nairobi, where we developed terms of reference for the community knowledge too. And quite politely, they did not use those because ultimately they wanted to test something different and through that process, the analysis and the knowledge that was created was quite rich. Whereas if we had standardised, as we have done across the other cities, we might not have been able to get that richness. But my sense is, irrespective of that, people who are often studied by academics, there are power imbalances, and what has been really great about the cities that have strong SDI affiliates is they have already embedded confidence about their worth and what they know and why their knowledge is important, but also are willing and able to demand more from academics in terms of how they engage with them. So there is that dynamic.

Chris Jordan And it’s really struck me on the few occasions where we’ve been able to bring all the city teams and community researchers together, it’s been really interesting to see community workers, community researchers work as a caucus and to share their experiences and to challenge researchers as a block.

Beth Chitekwe-Biti Yeah, no, they’re not shy at all.

Chris Jordan What’s your perspective then, Diana? I mean obviously having organised communities, pushing for change is one of the central areas of the theory of change. Have you seen that kind of evidence for that emerging through the process so far?

Diana Mitlin So I think we’ve definitely got strong communities pushing for change. I think the examples Beth has mentioned, the examples I’ve mentioned, we have a whole host of others that you can see and interested listeners can see on our website. I think that there’s still work to do, still work in progress. I think that we are always looking to capture effective dialogue between the community components, community participants, community researchers and academics. We’re developing a suite of tools that come out of different projects about how they can better engage with each other and find things out together. So I think that’s already something that is working really well. I think we have succeeded within the SDI family in making those groups more deliberate in realising that they should be a little bit clearer in dealing with researchers about “these are our objectives, this is what’s important to us, how can we find a way to talk about that?” I think that’s working well. I think together those things, the tools, the changed academics, the slightly more demanding SDI groups, and groups beyond SDI as well, I think you made the point that we’re not just working with SDI affiliates, we have a host of other community groups. Making them more demanding is creating the conditions under which there is unlearning going on, I think on all sides. So groups are trying to unlearn. I think we are resetting expectations about what grassroots experience, what grassroots knowledge can offer to academics and professionals, and at the same time, how willing some professionals and academics are to really find ways to co-constitute a new kind of knowledge. I hope that as we move forward, we’ll deepen and broaden this work. I think it really shows amazing potentials for ensuring that expertise addresses really fundamental issues of exclusion, of disadvantage, of poverty reduction. I think that is the point at which these groups come together. I think we can potentially really develop a set of approaches that demonstrate how expertise is relevant, is important and if it is so constituted it can really work effectively.

Chris Jordan So just to start to draw the conversation to a close, Beth, looking forward more broadly, what else do you think can be done to really raise the profile and understanding about the central importance of community knowledge in urban reform processes? Is this about a case by case, site fights, and trying to get to the city level, or is it working beyond or is it a bit of both? What’s going to move the dial?

Beth Chitekwe-Biti So if I reflect back across the ACRC journey, I think we definitely have made the arguments of the validity and centrality of community knowledge within research and in our understanding of the urban development challenges, be it power, be it exclusion, be it opportunities. What I hope we do is to communicate what we have learned and what we continue to learn in a way that allows for more uptake by other researchers, but also even professionals who are working and dealing with grassroots organisations. I think that’s the frontier. Because for urban development interventions to be relevant and really address deep-seated exclusion, but also in a way that benefits people, it’s absolutely important that this component of the learning is embedded in that process.

Chris Jordan Thank you very, very much for joining me today. Really interesting to talk and I can’t wait to see how all of this develops, which we will obviously keep you up to date with on the podcast, on the blog and our social media. So thank you very much.

Beth Chitekwe-Biti Thank you, Chris.

Diana Mitlin Thank you, Chris.

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From black spot to green hub: Community waste management in Ajegunle-Ikorodu

Christopher Jordan — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:13:37 +0000

By Deji Akinpelu

On a plot of land in Ajegunle-Ikorodu, Lagos that could easily have become another illegal dumping site, something different is taking shape. Plastic bottles that once ended up in nearby drainages can now be traded for cash, while food waste is being turned into compost and used to support an urban farm.

The transformation began with an important question: what actually happens to the waste generated by households and vendors in an informal community where formal collection services do not consistently reach?

Ajegunle-Ikorodu’s waste challenge was also an evidence gap

Recent statements by the Lagos State officials indicate that the volume of waste generated in Lagos may now be closer to 17,000 tonnes of waste daily, up from the 13,000 tonnes usually cited by the State. With much of this waste ending up in landfills, the State Government is exploring ways to promote source separation and recover value from waste through waste-to-wealth and waste-to-energy initiatives. However, far less is known about the volume of waste generated within communities, particularly in informal settlements where the potential for recovery and reuse may be significant.

The baseline study focuses on Ajegunle-Ikorodu, a low-income informal settlement in Kosofe, Lagos, and sets out to close part of that gap by conducting rigorous household surveys through citizen mobilisation, identifying existing waste practices and service providers and quantifying waste generated within the community from households and food vendors.

The study was undertaken by Rethinking Cities in partnership with the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development (CHSD), University of Lagos, with support from the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC).

The baseline results showed both service gaps and a local waste economy

The results showed the scale of the challenge. 67% of households reported no access to the formal collection trucks. This gap sits within a formal collection system coordinated by Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) and delivered through Private Sector Partnership (PSP) operators. Many residents therefore rely on burning, open dumping and scavengers (abokis). Meanwhile, 59% of respondents reported experiencing flooding monthly or more during the rainy season, highlighting issues relevant to the ongoing climate resilience project in the community.

During Focus Group Discussions, participants linked the flooding to waste disposal practices, including dumping waste in canals and drainages and using it to fill potholes. Yet the data also revealed an existing waste economy: 70% of households already sold recyclables to informal collectors, and 65% earned some income from doing so, with some reporting monthly earnings of up to N30,000.

The baseline was designed to understand these realities with the community members. Community Waste Investigators, many of them members of the local SDI Federation, were trained to participate directly in data collection. They led a structured survey of 303 households across the neighbouring Ajegunle, Irawo and Thomas Community Development Associations (CDAs). Five focus group discussions brought together landlords, tenants, women, youth and informal waste pickers, while key informant interviews with CDA leaders added further context.

The findings were subsequently shared with community members and stakeholders at a community engagement that brought together the ACRC Lagos team, government representatives, civil society organisations and residents. The study and its findings also received coverage from The Guardian, THISDAY, Development Reporting and The CHSD.

Community research turned findings into a working integrated circular economy hub

The result was more than a dataset. The study found an estimated 85% willingness to participate in a better waste management system, creating an opportunity to move from evidence to action. A five-day physical waste audit then sorted 619kg of waste from 161 samples across 16 locations within the community.

The community waste quantification became the basis for an Integrated Circular Economy Hub or Green Hub on a site that had been on its way to becoming another illegal dumping ground. The community leader (Baale) decided to donate the used land space to prototype the project.

The space became open to construct a hub for the Community Waste Investigators to operate, bringing together recycling, composting and urban farming in one community-managed space. Its recycling stream receives materials including plastic bottles, nylons, paper and metals, creating a route for recoverable materials to re-enter the market.

Food waste, specifically fruit and vegetable peels are channelled into composting, while the urban farm reuses recovered plastic for farm structures and irrigation. Crops are also grown in sacks using compost to support the growing cycle. Together, these activities demonstrate how materials that would otherwise be discarded can be recovered and redirected into productive uses.

More importantly, the hub makes the waste system visible.

Residents can see what is separated, where recyclable materials go, how organic waste is processed and how recovered materials can support other community activities. This creates a practical space for learning, testing ideas and building local capacity, while also generating evidence on what is feasible in a dense, underserved settlement. The aim is not to treat the hub as a standalone facility, but as part of a wider system of community action, market linkages and institutional engagement.

The hub is managed by members of the original Community Waste Investigators, who have since become Community Waste Champions. The Association of Scrap and Waste Pickers of Lagos (ASWOL) provides technical guidance on plastics pricing and marketing, while community leaders and government stakeholders have demonstrated buy-in. This early involvement has helped ground the model in local ownership and create connections between community practice and formal institutions.

New evidence is reshaping where the project goes next

The experience of the hub is already influencing the project’s next phase. Phase One analysis demonstrated that 80% of collected food waste originated from just 20% of collection points, primarily commercial food vendors who produce cleaner waste streams. As a result, Phase Two will focus collection resources on vendor clusters, while redirecting household efforts towards education on home composting for small-scale farming.

The team will also strengthen the integration of informal waste pickers, many of whom are from Northern Nigeria with farming backgrounds, into the hub’s recovery system, linking their existing role in collecting recyclables and their farming experience with more organised collection and market access.

Alongside this, the team is considering faster composting methods, including black soldier fly larvae composting, which could reduce processing time and create a potential marketable feed product. Then, a farm-to-table model through the urban farm.

In parallel, proposed standard guidelines for developing and operating Green Hubs will draw on technical oversight from the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency in collaboration with other stakeholders, while the team explores how hub data could connect to carbon and plastic credit opportunities.

From one community to a wider model for Lagos

The model has begun gaining momentum beyond the community. Representatives from various government ministries, departments and agencies have visited the site, including officials from the Office of Climate Change and Circular Economy, the Lagos State Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency, the Lagos State Resilience Office, as well other institutions like the Resilient Cities Network, C40 Cities, Lagos Urban Development Initiative, amongst others.

A stakeholders engagement hosted by Heinrich Böll Stiftung brought civil society and government stakeholders together, while the Lagos State Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources has committed financial support towards efforts to replicate the model in Ojokoro and Amuwo Odofin while also collaborating with the team to host a programme for World Cleanup Day.

The initiative sits within a broader shift in Lagos towards waste sorting at source, organic waste processing, methane reduction and the circular economy. Its contribution is to add community-generated model and practical experience to that vision.

What began as a study of how waste moves through Ajegunle-Ikorodu is becoming a model for exploring how community residents, informal actors, researchers and government can work together to recover materials, improve local systems and develop responses that can be adapted elsewhere.

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Waste, work and organising in Old Fadama, Accra

Hannah — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

For over 40 years, Hawa Dawudu has lived in Old Fadama, Accra – a historic informal settlement, with a growing population of over 120,000 and the location of one of the city’s largest fruit and vegetable markets.

A new film, produced by the Know Your City TV team at SDI, gives a personal insight into the experiences of Hawa and some of her neighbours as they navigate daily life in the community.

Released for World Habitat Day and the start of Urban October, Hawa’s story highlights the complexity and systemic issues that Old Fadama’s residents deal with every day. Like the majority of ACRC’s action research in the city, dealing with waste is a major focus, which creates very real problems, but also presents opportunities for the community.

Old Fadama is a low-lying settlement along the Odaw river in Ghana’s capital city. The area is prone to flooding, which is made worse when waste blocks drainage channels, bringing with it waterborne diseases.

Accra generates around 1,500 tonnes of solid waste per day, but only about 55% is collected, usually in higher income areas of the city. Hawa and the residents of Old Fadama are often left to fend for themselves, with large amounts dumped in the rivers and lagoon, or burned.

Better cities. Built together.

But communities aren’t standing idle. Building on the long-term organising of local savings groups supported by SDI, residents are creating livelihoods and value out of the city’s waste issue.

Since the film was shot, ACRC has been helping Hawa’s group to create a community composting facility on a piece of land donated by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly. Group members source organic waste from the markets and households to create compost, which they plan to sell – reinvesting any profits into further developing the community.

We’re also backing the efforts of informal motorised waste transporters – widely known as “borla taxis” – to receive formal recognition of the vital role they play at the interface of the informal and formal waste systems.

While the job they do is critical, a lack of regulatory framework and acknowledgement perpetuates stigma and makes it impossible for them to bid for formal government contracts. By strengthening the Borla Taxi Association, we’re helping young men who have often migrated to the city to create better livelihoods for themselves, while improving services for all of Accra’s residents.

Urban October aims to celebrate the people and initiatives creating better cities together.

We’re thrilled to highlight the experiences, challenges and insights of Hawa and her fellow residents of Old Fadama as they build a better life and a better city.

Read more:

ACRC’s action research projects in Accra were based on extensive scoping research that examined the city systems and politics, alongside the issues of housing, informal settlements, land and economic development. Read the full report.
A more detailed summary of our action research projects focused on waste in Accra can be found here.
More information about our work in Accra is available on our city page.

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Get to know… Tom Goodfellow

Hannah — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Hear from ACRC’s CEO, Tom Goodfellow, as he tells us about how he got into urban development, what he finds most interesting about the ACRC approach, what African cities can do to drive progress, and more.

Watch the video profile and read the full conversation below…

Tell me about your role in ACRC and what you’re working on at the moment?

So I’m Tom Goodfellow and I’m coming into the role of CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, which means I’ll be working alongside our fabulous senior management team in the consortium – located in various parts of the world – to lead the consortium into the next phase of its work, as we get a load of action research projects to completion, deliver outputs and start thinking about learning between our many projects, which are taking place in seven cities across Africa.

Some of the things I’ve been doing recently particularly are around getting some of the last action research projects in our portfolio to the point where they’re finalised and ready to go, because some of them are only just starting. That includes for example new projects to secure land rights for communities in Kampala in Uganda – building on an earlier study we’re trying to really roll that out on the ground. We’ve got projects around school feeding in Nairobi, trying to ensure that children in informal schools across the city can have access to food. Also, there’s work going on in Lagos, for example, around much more equitable models of property taxation for low-income communities in the city. So those are some of the projects that we’re working to get off the ground.

And I’m also excited because we’ve got a new area of work emerging around rural–urban migration and other kinds of migration into cities, and through this we’re really trying to get a better understanding of mobility patterns in the context of the African cities we work in.

How did you get into urban development?

Well, that’s a very interesting question as it’s not something I necessarily anticipated, having not really studied cities or even geography earlier in my kind of life and career! But I became interested partly through a friend’s mum, who was an academic working on cities in South Africa after apartheid. And I got interested in how cities, particularly divided cities and conflict-affected cities, overcome those kinds of things. And through that work, I ended up doing a PhD, where I was looking at post-conflict cities and rapidly growing cities in post-conflict environments, particularly in Uganda and Rwanda, which is where I did my PhD research.

So I became really interested in cities in Africa in the context of rapid growth, how you manage issues around land and infrastructure and housing in that context. And then from there, I ended up doing more comparative work with colleagues in different parts of Africa, and that leads me to where I am. So it was kind of an accident when I ended up doing a little bit of a favour for a friend’s mum, helping her out with some stuff she was writing for a publication, and just got hooked.

What’s interesting about the ACRC approach?

There are so many interesting things. It’s quite challenging to choose just one. I won’t say anything here about a particular project or a particular theme of the work we do, but one thing that I’m finding really interesting is how projects spin out from something that can be quite small on the ground. It can be a particular site where there’s waste recycling, or it can be one particular part of a neighbourhood where some drains are being put in, and how this kind of small project can spin out into this large network of committed organisations and individuals to get this thing to work, to get this thing to really bring a change.

It grows from something small into something much bigger in terms of all the people who have to be involved and you can see the energy growing, whether it’s government agencies getting involved, communities themselves, organisations they work with, and you start to see those systemic interactions: how waste and climate resilience and water and sanitation all connect to each other through this one small project initially. So I think that’s what I’m really learning: how we see change spinning out from particular sites or particular issues into wider, more systemic forms of change.

What ACRC paper, blog or podcast do you most recommend?

Well, there are many that I recommend and we’ve got this very vibrant blog series, so I do hope that people keep an eye on that because blogs come through very regularly that really showcase the action research projects on the ground. That’s the best way to see what’s happening. We also have many project reports in the pipeline, as most of our reports about the active action research are yet to come, although we have many really interesting studies already online as well.

I’m quite keen on podcasts, not least because I also get involved in making them sometimes, and one that was really interesting to me was when I had a conversation with two of our city managers, Jack Makau in Nairobi and Temilade Sesan in Lagos. They were talking about how they learned from each other and how their cities learned from each other. That’s come out and been put out recently through the African Cities podcast. I do recommend that for people who are interested in that kind of transnational, translocal learning about how urban change happens.

How can cities drive progress?

Very good question – I’m mostly obviously interested in what all of our partners based in the cities we work in have to say about that in their own cities. But thinking across the whole set and the wider issues, I think we see cities learning a lot from each other, in two ways, very obviously. On the one hand, you see city governments and national governments learning about how to market their cities for investment, to sort of position them within regional and global orders as kind of sites of modernity and investment. And there’s a lot of learning that happens there. And secondly there’s a lot of learning that happens between communities about how to try and assert their rights.

What I’d like to see more of, I think, is something in between, which is really about municipalities and city governments learning from each other – not just about how to market and get investment, but about how to really realise the value of their populations, how to work effectively with communities in ways that actually helps to enhance the city without undermining community rights. Because we do see rights being undermined in some of our cities. This is about learning not just between the big cities but also the smaller cities and the secondary cities where most of the growth is happening, to really see more of those cities leading the way sharing examples, as well as learning from bigger ones, so that we get a sense that smaller cities are also celebrated and we can see the innovation happening there. I mean, I’m based in the city of Sheffield, which in the UK is one of those smaller cities, so I often think about how we could be engaging with and learning with smaller places as well.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Well, it’s interesting because you asked about how I got into urban development, and I didn’t mention this but the friend whose mum got me interested in African cities – she herself was South African – I was in a band with her son and used to play music a lot. Since having children and having a different kind of life for a while, I’ve kind of lost the habit, but I’m getting a bit more into it again now – not least because my children are really interested in music and play quite a few musical instruments between them. So I’ve been getting back into that and making use of the fact that we have more musical instruments around the house. So that’s been nice.

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Climate savings: How Harare’s informal settlement communities are leading adaptation efforts

Hannah — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Community-led climate action

Across Harare’s informal settlements, climate change is no longer a distant threat, but a lived reality, manifesting in extreme weather patterns, disease outbreaks and environmental degradation that shape everyday survival. In the face of these challenges, communities are coming together to respond to the impacts collectively. Through ACRC’s Informal Settlements Climate Change Action (ISCCA) project, communities are organising to lead climate resilience efforts.

As part of a miniseries covering progress in the ISCCA project, this fifth blog post highlights the key role that climate savings groups play in advancing community climate resilience. The first outlines the climate action goals the initiative is seeking to achieve and what’s been happening so far, the second explores the establishment of a community-led climate action network, the third spotlights grassroots activities taking place in different communities, and the fourth shares lessons on the importance of political alignment from two informal settlements.

By Shiela Muganyi

In Harare, climate change is reshaping lives, livelihoods and local environments. But while every community feels these impacts, informal settlements face the harshest realities. Weak infrastructure, limited services, insecure land tenure and high levels of poverty make them exceptionally vulnerable to climate shocks.

Yet, within these same communities, effective solutions are emerging – rooted in collective action, local knowledge and community savings for climate resilience.

Barriers to accessing climate finance

Despite the urgency of climate impacts, communities in Harare’s informal settlements face barriers in accessing formal climate finance. International and national funds often require documentation, credit histories or proof of land tenure that they cannot provide. Large-scale financing mechanisms are designed for governments or institutions, not small, community-driven initiatives.

Even when funds are available, lengthy bureaucratic processes delay access, leaving communities unable to respond quickly to shocks. Women, who often lead adaptation at household and community levels, are excluded from formal finance systems, despite being central to resilience-building.

Community climate savings: A local solution

Community climate savings groups are helping informal settlement residents deal with these challenges. For years, federations of the urban poor have mobilised savings groups to support housing, basic services and emergency needs. As climate impacts intensify, these groups are deliberately saving for climate resilience. Federation members set aside funds specifically to prepare for and respond to climate shocks, pooling local resources to strengthen their own capacity to adapt.

Through the Informal Settlements Climate Change Action (ISCCA) project, this approach has been scaled across Harare’s informal settlements and beyond. Communities are not only saving for emergencies, but proactively investing in adaptation measures that reduce risks and build long-term resilience.

Solidarity in action in Dzivarasekwa

In Dzivarasekwa Extension, community members formed a solidarity savings group for climate adaptation. Members pooled their contributions and shared the funds at the end of the year to purchase building materials for retrofitting flood-damaged houses and constructing permanent, resilient homes.

They also used their savings to start a poultry project, designed to cushion households against the impacts of drought by diversifying food and income sources. Some groups saved for food, ensuring families would not go hungry during the festive season, while others prepared for school fees, protecting children’s education from climate-related financial shocks.

Saving for water security in Hopley

In Hopley settlement, savings groups have tackled one of the most pressing climate challenges: water scarcity. Through their collective savings, residents have financed and drilled five boreholes. This achievement underscores the power of local finance to deliver critical infrastructure where formal systems have failed.

Building long-term climate resilience

Going beyond supporting emergency responses and short-term infrastructure projects, community climate savings build commitment, solidarity, confidence and long-term resilience among group members. They strengthen social cohesion, foster collective responsibility and empower residents to plan for the future, rather than react to disasters.

Key lessons learned

These two examples reveal some clear lessons:

> Collective action is not just about participation – it depends on aligned leadership, shared vision and the ability to navigate power.

> If local leaders are not united and there is no smart approach to working with those in power, even the most well designed projects might not succeed.

To scale these efforts, significant barriers must be overcome. Savings groups must be acknowledged as legitimate actors in climate finance systems. Stakeholders should co-invest in community-led initiatives, leveraging local finance as a foundation. Climate finance mechanisms must be simplified and tailored to reach grassroots actors directly. And women-led savings groups should be prioritised, given their proven role in driving resilience.

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Governing contested markets: City authority, trader agency and SME policy in Harare

Hannah — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Urban markets in Harare

Urban markets are at the centre of life in Harare, providing livelihoods to thousands of people, supplying affordable goods and anchoring the city’s informal economy. Action research in the city so far has looked at improving infrastructure and strengthening trader capacity in the Glen View 8 Furniture Complex (GV8FC). The Pundutso Urban Markets Project (PUMP) is building on learnings from this initiative to support further market improvements across Harare, through creating institutional space for traders and the City of Harare to collaborate meaningfully.

In this blog miniseries looking at urban markets in Harare, the first post explores the City of Harare’s receding role in urban markets, the second outlines priority actions for tackling fire risks in markets, the third takes a closer look at market sanitation, and this fourth one reflects on contested market governance.

By Tapiwa Nyamukapa, Hazel Musvovi and Kudzai Chatiza

Key takeaways

Policy reform has improved institutional recognition of markets, but operational bottlenecks, especially around maintenance and procurement, continue to undermine service delivery.
A clear disconnect exists between traders and the City, with limited mechanisms for collaboration on small-scale infrastructure management, despite traders’ willingness to contribute resources.
Emerging financial innovations, such as the City Micro Finance Bank, offer new opportunities, but their impact will depend on inclusive governance and effective integration with market management systems that clearly build trader trust in the City and its various governance instruments.

Dialogue on Shelter (DoS) and the Development Governance Institute (DGI) are collaborating on the Pundusto urban markets project, which is looking at inclusive land tenure and infrastructure financing, implemented under ACRC in Harare.

The action research focuses on selected markets in Harare, examining land and infrastructure tenure, governance arrangements and policy options to support inclusive and productive urban markets. This blog post reflects on insights from a preparatory meeting with the City of Harare’s Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Division.

The engagement took place amid persistent tensions over market governance. While the City of Harare frames markets as municipal assets subject to City policy and administrative authority, traders increasingly treat them as autonomous economic spaces. This unresolved contestation shapes how policy is interpreted, resisted and implemented on the ground.

SME and decentralisation policies

In 2023, the City of Harare adopted a small and medium enterprises (SME) policy in response to the rapid growth of informal economic activity. The policy provides a formal framework for managing markets and supporting SMEs, including upgrading the former markets unit into a dedicated SME Division. At the same time, city-scale decentralising of administration into five regions was beginning.

These policy and operational reforms are intended to bring decision making and key personnel closer to communities. However, while decentralisation has expanded institutional presence, it has not yet resolved limits to the City’s effective reach within markets.

Infrastructure, trader fees and maintenance

The City is responsible for infrastructure across approximately 60 markets and for ensuring that trading environments meet relevant standards of safety and adequacy. Formal traders pay a monthly licence fee of between USD 10 and USD 25, creating expectations of basic services. Yet these revenues are not readily available for routine maintenance, due to municipal and national procurement requirements, resulting in persistent delays, particularly for minor repairs.

Trader committees and governance tensions

These operational challenges reflect deeper governance tensions, rather than simple capacity gaps. Although the SME policy provides for market management committees, relationships between traders and the City are marked by selective engagement. Traders often mobilise personal resources to maintain facilities but are constrained by rules that prohibit them from intervening in municipally owned infrastructure.

In the absence of formal co‑management protocols, markets operate in a “governance vacuum”, where responsibility is shared in practice but not recognised institutionally or mobilised predictably. The structural governance gaps have constrained delivery of everyday market service needs as well as medium- to long-term infrastructure and workspace management and expansion.

City Micro Finance Bank

The City of Harare has initiated establishment of a City Micro Finance Bank, through which market revenues will be channelled and affiliated traders may access credit. Beyond financing, the bank represents an attempt to re‑anchor markets within municipal governance through financial mechanisms. This raises the prospects of addressing questions on revenue ringfencing, trader inclusion, accountability and appropriate decisionmaking relating to SME support.

Policy pathways to explore

Overall, recent reforms signal a shift towards recognising markets as central economic and employment nodes. However, policy effectiveness continues to be shaped by competing claims over authority and control.

Building on earlier ACRC investments, the next phase of research seeks to strengthen traders’ voice by testing governance and financing arrangements that reconcile municipal responsibility with trader agency. Without negotiated frameworks, the risk is that Harare’s markets remain sites of policy friction rather than inclusive and productive engines of urban economic transformation. As data gathering and analysis progress, it will be critical to explore the viability of the following pathways:

1. Introduction of formal co-management protocols that allow traders and the City to jointly address minor maintenance issues, with clear rules on accountability and cost-sharing.

2. Streamlining procurement procedures for routine market maintenance, including thresholds below which simplified processes can be applied.

3. Strengthening trader organisations and representation, enabling more effective engagement with decentralised City structures and financial institutions supporting market development.

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Unlocking progress: Lessons on collective climate action from Harare

Hannah — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Community-led climate action

As part of a miniseries covering progress in the ISCCA project, this fourth blog post shares lessons on the importance of political alignment from two informal settlements. The first outlines the climate action goals the initiative is seeking to achieve and what’s been happening so far, the second explores the establishment of a community-led climate action network, the third spotlights grassroots activities taking place in different communities, and the fifth highlights the key role that climate savings groups play in advancing community climate resilience.

By Shiela Muganyi

Across Harare’s informal settlements, the Informal Settlements Climate Change Action (ISCCA) initiative is showing that responding to climate change is not just about technical solutions, but about how people organise, how decisions are made and how power is navigated.

From drainage issues in Stoneridge to water access in Hopley, communities are taking locally-led adaptation actions. To be effective, such actions require strong leadership and political commitment.

ISCCA’s experience highlights that implementation does not depend solely on resources or plans. In many cases, progress only accelerates when communities, institutions and political leaders align. Conversely, it often stalls when internal power dynamics disrupt unity.

In this blog post, we reflect on two contrasting ISCCA experiences in informal settlements. In Harare South settlement, alignment unlocked action; and in Boko Haram settlement, fragmented leadership slowed progress. These cases highlight the fact that change in informal settlements is not only technical but also deeply political. The speed at which change happens depends on the ability of communities, institutions and political leaders to align.

Accelerating action through strategic alignment in Harare South

The process of building resilience in Harare South is illustrative of how change happens.

At first, ISCCA’s work with the Member of Parliament’s (MP’s) Development Committee moved slowly because of hierarchy and gatekeeping, which made it hard to reach decision makers. But once we spoke directly with the MP, the process changed quickly. We obtained approval to move forward, and the MP’s office sent people to help ISCCA with its work in Stoneridge and Hopley. After weeks of delays, progress began almost immediately.

This demonstrates a critical insight: gaining the support of political leaders does not always happen through official channels. Instead, it often requires a strategic, focused approach. This involves an understanding of who holds power, finding the best way in and being flexible in how to connect.

At the same time, this process highlighted the importance of alignment. When the community, the MP’s leadership and the alliance worked together, it set the stage for things to start happening. When everyone is on the same page and leaders are committed, progress speeds up.

Power dynamics undermining collective action in Boko Haram

The experience of ISCCA in the Boko Haram settlement was very different. The settlement has three cooperatives, each with its own leaders. Two of these groups were ready to work with ISCCA, but one cooperative, led by a very influential chairman, blocked progress.

This chairman used his political position to delay and weaken efforts to reach an agreement, causing division in the community. Because of this, ISCCA found it hard to get everyone on board, and it is now unlikely that the project will move forward in this settlement.

This situation shows that the existence of community groups does not in itself guarantee that people will work together. When leadership is divided or challenged, even good projects can get stuck.

Key lessons learned

These two examples reveal some clear lessons:

> Collective action is not just about participation – it depends on aligned leadership, shared vision and the ability to navigate power.

> If local leaders are not united and there is no smart approach to working with those in power, even the most well designed projects might not succeed.

Building on these lessons, we have identified four key requirements to help us – and others working with communities on climate resilience – to deal with similar situations:

1. Understanding internal power dynamics early;

2. Identifying both enablers and blockers within leadership structures;

3. Investing in social cohesion and trust before implementation;

4. Remaining adaptive where alignment cannot be achieved.

These experiences are a reminder that building climate resilience in informal settlements is about more than infrastructure, funding or technical plans. People, power and alignment are crucial to unlocking progress. Where communities are organised and leadership is committed, change can happen quickly and meaningfully. But where power is fragmented or contested, even the most promising interventions can stall.

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WASH in urban markets: Governance lessons from Kuwadzana 4 Market, Harare

Hannah — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Urban markets in Harare

In this blog miniseries looking at urban markets in Harare, the first post explores the City of Harare’s receding role in urban markets, the second outlines priority actions for tackling fire risks in markets, this third one takes a closer look at market sanitation, and the fourth reflects on contested market governance.

“We pay, but the council isn’t resolving our sanitation issues.”

By Kudzai Chatiza, Hazel Musvovi and Tapiwa Nyamukapa

Kuwadzana 4 Market in Harare is one of the sites for ACRC’s inclusive land tenure and infrastructure financing study. Like many urban markets, it relies on sanitation facilities provided by the City of Harare. Yet the market’s restroom, intended to serve both traders and customers, is frequently non-functional. This persistent failure points not only to operational challenges, but also to deeper governance weaknesses in the way that market services are financed, managed and overseen.

The market at Kuwadzana 4 hosts a diverse range of economic activities, including secondhand clothing sales, vegetable trading, auto repairs, live poultry markets and hardware retail. Over time, trader numbers have far exceeded the market’s original design capacity. Trading activities have spilled into bus stop shelters, service alleys, shop fronts and along the main road.

A locally constituted management committee works with the City to encourage traders to pay monthly subscriptions, in order to address minor maintenance issues. Market traders report paying USD 10 per month and understandably they expect basic services in return.

Strained sanitation facilities

Sanitation, however, remains a critical and unresolved gap. Traders describe repeated failures to repair the restroom facility – a situation that has contributed to open defecation around the market. As one trader put it plainly: “We pay fees, but the council isn’t resolving our sanitation issues.” This sentiment reflects a broader breakdown in the perceived social contract between traders and Harare City.

Even when the facility is operational, it is inadequate for the scale and intensity of use. Registered traders, unregistered vendors, customers for nearby shops and patrons of a municipal beer hall all depend on the same toilets. The absence of clear rules on access, combined with weak enforcement, places excessive strain on already limited infrastructure and accelerates its deterioration.

In response, traders have adopted informal coping strategies. When a pipe in the men’s restroom broke, they pooled their own resources to restore one toilet. While this demonstrates initiative and collective action, it also exposes a governance dilemma. These self-help measures operate outside formal municipal systems, raising questions about liability, standards and sustainability. Traders fill gaps left by the City, yet lack the authority to make durable repairs or manage facilities in a way that is formally recognised.

Unclear accountability and financial shortfalls

Underlying these problems is an unclear division of responsibilities. While the City retains formal authority over market infrastructure and WASH services, it appears to lack the financial flexibility, technical capacity or administrative responsiveness to maintain them effectively. Frontline officials closest to the markets often lack the mandate or resources to act quickly, while escalation processes are slow and opaque. For traders, reporting problems rarely translates into timely action.

Financial governance further complicates the situation. Traders pay regular fees, but there is little transparency around how these revenues are allocated or whether any portion is ringfenced for market-level services such as sanitation. Without visible reinvestment, trust erodes and compliance weakens over time. At the same time, theCity faces the challenge of servicing rapidly growing and partially informal markets, using funding and planning models designed for smaller, more controlled trading environments.

The result is a cycle of underinvestment, informal fixes and declining service quality. From the traders’ perspective, this creates the impression of a City unable or unwilling to perform basic functions. From the City’s perspective, authorising informal solutions may undermine regulatory control and expose it to accountability risks. Both sides are trapped in a governance grey zone, where responsibility is shared in practice but not clearly defined in policy.

The experience of Kuwadzana 4 raises important questions. Why is something as basic as operating market toilets so difficult in Harare? Are existing financial and administrative arrangements fit for the scale and informality of today’s markets? How can trader contributions be governed more transparently to support service delivery? And what mix of policy reform, delegated authority and co-management could deliver auditable, sustainable solutions?

Policy implications

The experience of Kuwadzana 4 Market suggests that market sanitation failures are less about isolated technical breakdowns and more about gaps in urban governance. Addressing these challenges requires policy and administrative responses that recognise how markets function today.

While the detailed study is expected to provide citywide evidence from ten other Harare markets, preliminary insights from Kuwadzana 4 point to a need for the City to:

1. Clarify roles and empower delegated authority – Clearer allocation of responsibilities between municipal departments, frontline market officials and trader committees is needed. Where traders already play an informal maintenance role, policies should explicitly define what forms of delegated authority are permissible, under what conditions and with what safeguards. This would reduce the current grey zone, in which traders act out of necessity but without formal recognition.

2. Improve financial transparency and ringfencing – Trader fees create an implicit expectation of service delivery. Making visible how market revenues are allocated and whether funds are reinvested at market level could rebuild trust and improve compliance. Ringfencing a portion of market fees for routine WASH operations and minor repairs would strengthen accountability and reduce reliance on ad hoc community contributions. A policy on reinvestment of market fees exists, but its practical implementation appears lacking.

3. Adapt service models to scale and informality – Existing sanitation standards and maintenance models appear misaligned with the scale and density of contemporary markets. Policy frameworks need to account for mixed formal–informal usage, high foot traffic and shared facilities that serve surrounding businesses. Flexible service standards, combined with realistic maintenance plans, are essential for sustainability. The case of Kuwadzana 4 shows this to be a serious deficit.

4. Strengthen frontline response mechanisms – Market-level officials require clearer mandates, quicker escalation pathways and access to small operational budgets to address routine failures before they escalate. Without empowered frontline governance, reporting systems alone will continue to frustrate traders, without delivering results.

5. Institutionalise co-management arrangements – Rather than treating trader-led solutions as temporary or problematic, policy could formalise co-management models for market infrastructure. Well-defined partnerships, supported by basic oversight, auditing and technical guidance, could harness trader initiative while maintaining public accountability.

Market sanitation is not merely a technical issue. It is a test of urban governance – of how cities recognise informal economic actors, manage shared resources and deliver everyday services with dignity. Policy responses that bridge the gap between formal authority and everyday practice will be critical if markets are to remain viable economic and social spaces.

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Author acknowledgement: This blog draws on ACRC supported work but does not represent the views of the consortium or its funder, FCDO (United Kingdom). The contributions of ACRC Harare colleagues – especially George Masimba, Stephan Tafireyi (City of Harare, SMEs Division), Thomas Karakadzai and Tapiwa Nyamukapa, who took part in a meeting at the city’s Housing and Community Services Offices to discuss the Kuwadzana 4 issue following a field visit – are gratefully acknowledged.

← Grassroots power: What does community climate action look like in Harare’s informal settlements? Unlocking progress: Lessons on collective climate action from Harare →

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