community knowledge - 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.

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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.

Outro You have been listening to the African Cities podcast. Remember to subscribe for more urban development insights and interviews from the African Cities Research Consortium.

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

Hannah — Thu, 03 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, 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.

Generative AI statement: Copilot was used to process research notes and relevant literature to help prepare an initial draft of this blog post. This draft was then extensively edited by the communications team and approved by the author of the article.

← 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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Grassroots power: What does community climate action look like in Harare’s informal settlements?

Hannah — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Community-led climate action

As part of a miniseries covering progress in the ISCCA project, this third blog post spotlights grassroots activities taking place in different communities. 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 fourth shares lessons on the importance of political alignment from two informal settlements, and the fifth highlights the key role that climate savings groups play in advancing community climate resilience.

By Shiela Muganyi

As explored in a previous blog post, the city-wide Informal Settlements Network for Climate Change (ISN), established by ACRC’s Informal Settlements Climate Change Action (ISCCA) project, has become a powerful peer-to-peer platform, where communities collectively analyse climate impacts, share practical solutions and take action.

The network’s main innovation is its structure, which brings informal settlements together as a united force for change. By sharing experiences and learning from each other, ideas spread quickly from one settlement to the next. A solution that works in one place can inspire others elsewhere.

The ISN has redefined climate adaptation in Harare by demonstrating that organised informal settlement communities are not only capable of leading resilience efforts, but also of shaping a shared urban response that is inclusive, scalable and grounded in lived experience.

This blog post explores how communities involved in the network have learned from each other and taken action to advance climate resilience in their own settlements.

Improving waste management in Dzivarasekwa Extension – and beyond

“If we wait for the city, the waste will keep piling up around us. We decided to act with what we have.”

After identifying blocked drains as a major flood risk in their settlement, local climate change champions in Dzivarasekwa Extension launched a cleanup campaign, collectively dedicating one hour each day to clearing garbage and waste. Rather than waiting for municipal intervention, the community took responsibility for itself, reducing flood risks and showing how community-led action can protect lives and property.

Their efforts extended beyond just physical cleanup. They forged strategic partnerships with the local clinic and with a waste management company, Geo Pomona. The clinic provided personal protective equipment (PPE) and technical support. With Geo Pomona, families devised an affordable rotating payment model for waste collection services.

To address PPE shortages, the community pooled savings to buy durable gloves and supplies, reinforcing the community resilience-through-savings model.

Importantly, this knowledge spread beyond Dzivarasekwa Extension. Through documentation and the ISN WhatsApp group, lessons are being shared across settlements, enabling replication without requiring physical movement. Crowbrough settlement quickly adopted the cleanup campaign, mobilising even non-Federation members.

Tafara, Dzivarasekwa Extension and Crowbrough also established community hubs, which are living laboratories of locally-led adaptation. These hubs host community gardens, recycling initiatives and serve as training grounds to institutionalise resilience skills.

The Dzivarasekwa Extension case shows how networking and sharing can strengthen adaptation beyond single settlements – whether through face-to-face collaboration or digital platforms – ensuring disparate communities can learn, replicate and scale resilience together.

Waste as a resource to transform women’s livelihoods

Beyond risk reduction, communities are also turning climate challenges into livelihood opportunities. Across Harare’s informal settlements, waste picking, separating, sorting and recycling have become vital sources of income.

In Dzivarasekwa Extension, a group of women have been using their earnings from recycling to pay school fees, put food on the table and even construct resilient houses. As one waste picker proudly shared:

“We can now drink cold water from the refrigerator in this hot season. Because of our hard work, we now eat good food. Waste is seen as a burden, but to us it is a resource.”

This shift has had profound social impacts. By generating income, women have reduced household tensions that often fuel gender-based violence. Couples are no longer fighting over money for upkeep, as women’s contributions through recycling have eased financial strain.

Complementing these efforts, backyard gardens are flourishing across settlements – strengthening food security and helping families withstand climate shocks. Alongside recycling initiatives, these gardens show how that adaptation is not only about survival but about building sustainable, thriving communities.

Similarly, in Tafara, women’s efforts to manage waste are creating livelihood opportunities, alongside playing a critical role in their environmental stewardship. Waste recycling has started to generate income, supporting families to pay for school fees and buy food.

At the same time, savings groups are making a big difference in the community. Eight savings groups have saved USD 44,000 for water security in Stoneridge Informal Settlement and more than USD 32,000 for resilient housing construction. In Tafara, resilience is something people build every day with their own hands.

One woman participant from Tafara reflected:

“Savings are no longer about money only. They help us survive the challenges of climate change and beyond.”

Strengthening food security in Hopley

Hopley is a settlement located in the south of Harare without electricity. Building resilience in this settlement began with something simple: saving for food. More than 50 savings groups came together to help families get through tough times.

Over time, as savings increased, so did the community’s ambitions. Four groups, with just 40 members, managed to pool around USD 60,000. Instead of using it just to get by, they invested in solar systems and refrigerators. Now, those refrigerators are helping small businesses in the community to fight climate change challenges. Families store and sell perishable food, earn income and create their own energy solutions where there were none before.

A Hopley woman savings group member pointed out:

“We have passed through the phase of buying each other pots and pans. Now we have started saving for refrigerators to reduce the impact of high temperatures in Hopley.”

The road ahead

By coming together, communities are demonstrating that climate change resilience is built through collective action, strategic partnerships and innovative financial models. While challenges remain – such as securing adequate protective equipment and stronger support from city authorities – the way ahead is well defined.

To further scale resilience in Harare’s informal settlements, communities must be recognised and welcomed as legitimate actors in city-wide climate planning. The ISCCA experience shows that peer-to-peer learning platforms, community-driven finance and strategic partnerships can transform everyday actions into systemic adaptation.

By investing in community hubs, supporting savings groups and embedding local innovations into the city’s frameworks, organisations and city officials can ensure that resilience is not only replicated but institutionalised. Through empowering communities and enabling grassroots leadership, a sustainable urban future can be built by and for the residents of Harare’s informal settlements.

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Reimagining urban climate finance: From global commitments to community-led resilience

Hannah — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

By Sejal Patel, Logedi Luhangala, Anna Walynicki, Aaron Acuda, Anwesha Tewary, Bhagavati Adhikari, Philippine Vernes and Joy Amor Bailey, with inputs from Ceilito Bulagsac from the CBA session, Municipal Government of Saint Bernard, The Philippines

Climate change is intensifying root causes of vulnerabilities such as sociopolitical, demographic, economic and infrastructural challenges in many informal settlements (ie rapid urbanisation, weak infrastructure, flooding and heat stress). Yet, climate finance is still failing to reach many of the low-income urban communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

This blog post presents reflections from a recent session at the 20th International Conference on Community-based Adaptation to Climate Change (CBA20), which explored this issue through two key lenses: breadth of finance availability (range of instruments); and depth of finance delivery (access).

The session brought together perspectives from local governments, insurers, multilateral financiers and grassroots organisations working directly on the frontlines of urban climate resilience. The session was also part of an ongoing climate finance study across five African cities: Accra, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Nairobi, under the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC).

Joy Amor Bailey (Asian Development Bank) shares insights during the CBA20 urban climate finance session. Photo credit: Kentaro Koji

1. Breadth of finance availability: There needs to be a range of financial instruments and products available that service the spectrum of resilience functions to ensure robust coverage for building resilience.

Effective climate finance for informal settlements requires financing that supports communities to anticipate risks, absorb shocks and adapt to changing climate conditions. Different types of finance are required to meet these needs. We can map these against the “three A resilience framework”:

Resilience function	Financial functions	Examples
Anticipate	Preparedness and pre-arranged finance	Adaptation investments, resilience infrastructure, forecast-based financing, contingency planning, resilience funds
Absorb	Shock-responsive finance/risk financing	Parametric insurance, emergency grants, contingency funds, social protection top-ups, emergency liquidity
Adapt	Transformational and long-term investment finance	Upgrading informal settlements, resilient housing, livelihood diversification, climate-resilient infrastructure, access to affordable credit

The financiers for the different resilience functions vary. For example:

> Banks might be able to provide financing across all three functions.

> Community funds and saving schemes can provide financing that helps communities respond to shocks, and can also be for long-term investments (see Box 1).

> Insurers provide insurance products for responding to shocks. These products can act as a tool to transfer the financial burden of a potential catastrophe to reduce risk. For example, parametric insurance provides rapid liquidity after a shock, which strengthens absorptive capacity (see Box 2).

> Investors may be seeking to fund large-scale infrastructure for revenue generation, including by upgrading settlements or strengthening the climate resilience of infrastructure.

The financial coverage across these functions is not consistent and major gaps persist in availability, as well as accessibility for local communities. A key principle for improving the coverage is that funders need to spend more time directly engaging with vulnerable communities to better understand local contexts and priorities, in order to ensure that financial products being provided are relevant and suitable.

Box 1: Community funds

Community pooled funds and savings – typical of saving groups, cooperatives and women-led networks across the Huairou Commission’s network – play a critical role in building community resilience. Often given as small loans or grants for climate adaptation, livelihoods, emergency relief and housing, and used as social protection and safety nets, these layered instruments allow communities to address multiple intersecting vulnerabilities, as well as build partnerships with the local government. Community-generated data on vulnerability and local conditions strengthen grassroots ability to negotiate with their local governments and seek accountability.

Grassroots groups and landless communities living in informal settlements in Nepal have built three different types of funds – community resilience funds, activist funds and informal solidarity mechanisms (through small daily contributions from residents themselves) – to organise and address climate and development challenges. For example, the activist fund enables community organisers to support advocacy campaigns, protect activists and respond to movement-related needs, while the solidarity fund supports community action during floods, evictions and other crises without waiting for external assistance.

Because of their flexibility, these funds are easily accessible and respond faster to communities’ local priorities during climate emergencies than many formal/institutional arrangements. They strengthen local leadership, collective decision making and mutual accountability. Yet, despite being effective, they remain excluded from support and top-up resourcing from mainstream climate finance because they do not fit formal institutional requirements.

While these funds provide immediate support to communities dealing with climate shocks, they cannot substitute the formal mechanisms required for long-term resilience building and scaling of locally led solutions. Therefore, formal climate finance should recognise, strengthen and invest in these existing community-led mechanisms.

Box 2: Parametric insurance

Parametric insurance is increasingly being used to provide rapid, pre-arranged finance triggered by measurable climate indicators, such as rainfall levels, flooding or extreme heat. Unlike traditional insurance, which requires losses to be assessed before a payment is made, parametric insurance can release funding quickly once an agreed threshold is reached. This speed is particularly important for vulnerable urban informal workers, whose livelihoods can be disrupted by recurring climate shocks and who often have limited access to savings, credit or social protection.

However, experience shows that the effectiveness of parametric insurance depends as much on its design as on the financing itself. Insurance should not be viewed solely as a payout mechanism, but as a resilience tool that enables people to make more informed decisions before, during and after a shock. When people know support will arrive quickly and predictably, they are better able to avoid harmful coping strategies, protect livelihoods and recover more quickly.

Humanity Insured’s experience highlights the importance of community-led design. In India, consultations with female informal workers revealed that the current temperature threshold of 43.7°C used for heat insurance did not align with their lived experience of dangerous heat exposure, with users suggesting adjusting parameters to 40°C – insights that will be embedded into future project design. This reinforces a broader lesson for climate finance: financial instruments designed without community participation are less likely to be trusted, used or effective.

Trust, transparency and accessibility remain critical challenges. Communities often raise concerns about whether insurance triggers are legitimate, whether payouts will arrive as promised and whether products are designed for their circumstances. Successful approaches therefore combine simple and transparent triggers with trusted local delivery partners, such as municipalities, cooperatives and community organisations. For example, flood insurance initiatives supported by Humanity Insured in partnership with Communes of Togo have prioritised community engagement with residents, local government teams led by the mayor, and partners to shape transparent trigger design to strengthen confidence in the mechanism.

Emerging evidence suggests that well-designed, locally grounded parametric insurance can play an important role within broader resilience financing systems. In its first year since launching in October 2024, Humanity Insured used GBP 1.67 million in grant funding to mobilise GBP 33 million of insurance protection for 1.69 million people across 14 countries, resulting in GBP 6.7 million in payouts through pre-arranged risk financing mechanisms. Humanity Insured’s work demonstrates that when insurance is shaped with community engagement, trusted delivery channels and complementary resilience building activities, parametric insurance can help strengthen the absorptive capacity of vulnerable households and communities, while supporting longer-term resilience.

CBA participants visit an urban informal settlement in Manila to observe locally-led adaptation in action. Photo credit: Aaron Acuda

2. Depth of finance delivery: financing needs to be accessible to local actors.

There are calls from across the sector that highlight the need for climate finance systems to fundamentally shift from top-down delivery models towards approaches grounded in co-creation, flexibility and trust. Such approaches enable interventions that can more effectively address the local challenges of climate change. In such systems, communities should not simply be consulted after projects are designed, but should actively shape priorities, financing mechanisms, implementation strategies and accountability systems from the outset.

However, as funding opportunities are still often designed for large institutions rather than community-based organisations responding directly to climate impacts on the ground, there remains a large gap between available financing and financing that communities can access and manage. Often funders argue that the transaction costs of providing small-scale funding across many community organisations is too high.

Climate finance and policy institutions sometimes use terms such as “readiness”, “innovation”, and “transformation” to indicate their willingness to be early investors in building institutional capacities, and in testing new solutions and mechanisms to create systemic shifts in response to the challenges arising from climate change. However, these same principles of investing in capacities and iterative learning processes to build innovative solutions must be applied to climate investments in grassroots organisations and movements, with the recognition that they are continually experimenting with solutions to address the everyday challenges arising from development failures, exacerbated by climate change.

Communities report several barriers to accessing finance, including:

> Tenure, land rights and navigating informality (see Box 3);

> The mismatch between large-scale financing (for example, Multilateral Development Bank minimum transaction size, typically structured into multimillion-dollar investments) and the relatively small scale of community investment needs;

> Needing to complete proposals in English in rigid formats, rather than being able to use local languages and formats;

> Lengthy proposal reviews, procurement procedures and financing approval cycles that require ongoing capacity;

> Limited technical capacity, and inadequate climate information and data; and

> Weak institutional support at the national and local levels.

As well as stronger investments in community capacity development, including proposal writing, monitoring systems, climate data generation and project management support, the financing landscape needs to make more fundamental shifts towards supporting smaller and more local projects, designed and implemented by local actors. This would require a shift in financial institutions’ own frameworks and systems, to become more flexible and open to community-led practices, community capacities and simplified approaches (see Boxes 4 and 5).

Box 3: Reaching communities in informal settlements

The Nepal experience highlights important lessons for climate finance. While community resilience funds established in partnership with local governments can help align investments with public systems, bureaucratic approval processes have at times delayed communities’ access to funds for years. Communities in informal settlements are frequently treated as illegal occupants rather than legitimate urban residents, limiting their ability to access financial services and subsequently public financing or institutional support.

Many vulnerable populations are expected to meet highly technical funding requirements, despite lacking proposal-writing capacity, technical expertise or political recognition. This disconnect continues to exclude the very communities that climate finance is intended to support. Creating more accessible funding processes, including simplified applications and greater acceptance of community-generated evidence such as local data, photographs and videos, can help shape and strengthen urban climate responses.

Climate risk reduction measures themselves can sometimes result in displacement when undertaken without community participation or adequate planning. “Meaningful community participation” must extend beyond consultation to include grassroots leadership in co-planning and co-designing programmes and funds, based on local risk context in urban areas.

Box 4: Financing resilience requires investments in systems, and not just the hard infrastructure

The municipality of Saint Bernard provides a case of how community-based early warning systems can strengthen resilience when local ownership is prioritised. Their approach combined hazard monitoring technology, local radio systems, community preparedness and ecosystem restoration to reduce flood risks. The municipality found that sustaining these systems required blended financing from local governments, national agencies and international partners. The municipality found that resilience was not only about installing equipment; it was equally about trust, preparedness, training and community participation.

Box 5: Building partnerships for enabling action

Strengthening partnerships between communities, local governments, universities and civil society organisations can build stronger project pipelines and scalable resilience solutions.

In Indonesia and Pakistan, multistakeholder partnerships involving communities, research institutions, local governments, utility companies, civil society organisations and development partners enabled the successful demonstration of community-driven and nature-based resilience interventions. A participatory co-design methodology positioned communities as active stakeholders with decision making authority throughout project planning, implementation and operations and maintenance, strengthening local ownership and long-term sustainability.

In Makassar, Indonesia, the technical expertise of Monash University, policy and planning support from the local government and financing from a charitable foundation and Asian Development Bank’s Urban Climate Change Resilience Trust Fund (UCCRTF) facilitated the delivery of green corridors, constructed wetlands, and toilet facilities in informal settlements. These interventions improved human and environmental health and demonstrated the viability of nature-based, decentralised water and sanitation systems. In Pakistan, partnerships with civil society organisations, utility companies and local authorities supported the implementation of community-managed water supply systems, solid waste collection and resource recovery facilities in low-income urban communities in Abbottabad, as well as the gender-sensitive urban green space development in Sialkot.

These initiatives illustrate how collaborative partnerships can mobilise financing for adaptation investments and generate proof-of-concept for scalable resilience solutions. They also highlight that adaptation outcomes depend not only on physical infrastructure but on effective community participation, inclusive governance arrangements, local knowledge integration and sustained institutional capacity to support long-term resilience.

The future of urban resilience will depend not only on how much climate finance is mobilised globally, but on whether those resources can reach communities quickly, equitably and in ways that strengthen local leadership and long-term resilience.

Authors

Sejal Patel – Senior Researcher, IIED
Logedi Luhangala – Consultant, IIED
Anna Walnycki – Principal Researcher, IIED
Aaron Acuda – Researcher, IIED
Anwesha Tewary – Learning and Knowledge Management Specialist, Huairou Commission
Bhagavati Adhikari – Planner, Nepal Mahila Ekata Samaj (a member of Huairou Commission)
Philippine Vernes – Head of Philanthropy and Partnerships, Humanity Insured
Joy Amor Bailey – Deputy Team Leader (Consultant), Urban Resilience Trust Fund, Asian Development Bank

Organisations

IIED is an international policy and research organisation working with partners globally to build a fairer, more sustainable world. Together, they challenge the destructive economic models, unjust power dynamics, entrenched mindsets and protectionist laws that perpetuate poverty, suppress rights and hinder progress towards a thriving world. They explore solutions to complex economic, social and environmental crises, using research, action and influencing to tackle the root causes of climate change, nature loss and inequality.

Humanity Insured is a UK- and US-registered charity, backed by the insurance sector, that makes insurance accessible and effective for people facing climate volatility, helping to prevent climate shocks from driving them into deepening poverty. It funds insurance designed with the people it protects, empowering them with greater choice, agency, and a financial safety net to strengthen their long-term resilience.

Nepal Mahila Ekata Samaj (NMES) is a women’s network of slum and squatter communities located in Nepal. NMES engages 57,000 consolidated members in slum and squatter communities of rural, urban, and peri-urban areas on the issues of land and housing. The main areas of work for NMES are national constitutions, land and right policies, land use, women’s rights, and urban development policies. NMES joined Huairou Commission (HC) in 2007 to build leadership and empowerment of slum and grassroots women leadership, lobby, and advocate for women rights together with HC at the global level.

Huairou Commission (HC) is a women-led social movement of grassroots groups from poor urban, rural and indigenous communities in 38 countries. We position grassroots women as agents of change who must be at the center of development decision-making. Guided by values of solidarity and inclusion, we work for a transformed world with balanced power relations and communities free from poverty and other inequalities, across but not exclusively in gender, race, cultural dimensions.

The Urban Resilience Trust Fund (URTF) is a multi-donor trust fund with current resources from the UK government and The Rockefeller Foundation amounting to USD 84.73 million. Set to be implemented between 2023 and 2031 by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) under its Urban Financing Partnership Facility (UFPF), the fund provides technical assistance and promotes innovative investment grants in targeted thematic areas that support integrated resilience planning, design and implementation of climate-resilient infrastructure, and the sharing of knowledge on climate and disaster risk reduction.

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Networking solutions: Community-led climate adaptation in Harare’s informal settlements

Hannah — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Community-led climate action

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

By Shiela Muganyi

In the global South, many urban residents live in informal settlements. These communities face higher risks from flooding, heat, water shortages, poor sanitation and environmental damage. Still, they are often left out of formal climate funding, infrastructure investment and planning.

Communities are the first to respond to climate threats, using their local knowledge and early warning systems. They also maintain drainage systems, manage waste where official services are unavailable, and keep informal water sources operational. Their work helps cities become more resilient. So when these communities are left out of official decision making, cities miss the chance to create more inclusive and lasting climate solutions.

From global exclusion to local organisation

In Harare, ACRC is working with informal settlement communities to build reform groups and back local climate action. The Informal Settlements Climate Change Action (ISCCA) initiative is helping communities identify climate risks, organise, work together and shape how resilience solutions are designed and put in place. This approach has laid the groundwork for organised, collective action that goes beyond individual settlements.

As part of this effort, the newly established Informal Settlements Network for Climate Change (ISN) serves as a key platform for community-led climate governance. It brings together informal settlement residents to coordinate climate action, share learning and collectively influence decisions affecting their settlements. This enables communities to engage more effectively with the state and other stakeholders, in line with ACRC’s emphasis on reform coalitions and locally-led change.

The network started as a partnership between 11 settlements supported by the ISCCA project to assess their own climate risks, review data and develop local climate action plans. It has now expanded to include communities beyond the original group and is becoming a grassroots platform for climate governance in the city.

The local climate action plans highlight practical priorities that are shaped by the community, such as:

> Climate and disaster savings schemes – Community-led savings for emergencies, food security and rapid response to climate shocks;

> Housing construction and retrofitting – Constructing new and strengthening existing structures to withstand flooding, heat and extreme weather;

> Water access and management – Establishing water committees, drilling and maintaining boreholes and improving water governance;

> Waste management and recycling – Organising community waste systems, reducing pollution and promoting recycling initiatives;

> Drainage management – Clearing and maintaining drainage systems to reduce flooding and improve sanitation;

> Climate-resilient livelihoods – Supporting income-generating activities, such as backyard gardening, soil-in-sack farming and small-scale enterprises;

> Nature-based solutions – Tree planting, greening initiatives and soil conservation to reduce heat and manage flooding;

> River riparian restoration – Protecting and rehabilitating riverbanks to reduce erosion, manage flooding and restore ecological buffers;

> Road opening and access improvement – Clearing and establishing roads to improve mobility, drainage flow and emergency access within settlements.

Grounded in local realities, these plans combine everyday survival strategies with longer-term resilience building, forming the foundation for collective action through the ISN.

Connecting communities across shared challenges

Community-led vulnerability assessments revealed recurring and systemic risks across settlements, including: blocked drainage, leading to recurrent flooding; low-yield or unregistered boreholes and chronic water shortages; heat stress due to overcrowded housing and lack of green infrastructure; illegal dumping, unmanaged waste and pollution; and tenure insecurity, limiting long-term investment.

These problems point to bigger issues in how cities are managed, especially in informal neighbourhoods. Communities had already started addressing them – clearing drains, digging temporary channels, saving money and improving their housing structures. However, they realised that working alone without coordination, shared knowledge and institutional support was not enough. The ISN has supported these efforts to grow and reach more people.

The ISN now connects settlements across the city, including Boko Haram, Dzivarasekwa Extension, Tafara, Chizhanje, Caledonia, Crowborough Paddocks, Churu Farm, Stoneridge, Hatcliffe, Hopely, Budiriro 5B and Crowborough. By establishing clear roles that support coordinated, locally-led climate governance, the network connects members through shared practices and accountability.

Learn more | Local climate adaptation in Dzivarasekwa Extension

Dzivarasekwa Extension is a strong example of local climate adaptation, with residents working together on actions such as clearing drains and recycling waste. Community teamwork and organisation is key to driving these activities, with 36 people (27 women) attending a recent planning meeting in the settlement. This shows the critical role women play in leading climate action in the area, while young people bring labour, new ideas and energy to cleanup efforts.

The ISN’s support has helped to position Dzivarasekwa Extension as a climate hub, where other settlements can learn, share ideas and see practical examples in action. This has helped other communities – such as Hopley, Stoneridge and Chizhanje – to set up their own borehole committees, waste management systems and savings groups for climate resilience.

The network comprises:

> Community leadership committees – Coordinating and governing at the settlement level, these committees work with local authorities, hold community meetings, help resolve conflicts and ensure that climate priorities align with wider development efforts, such as regularisation and service delivery.

> Savings schemes and solidarity groups – Providing financial support for community-led climate action, these groups gather local resources for projects like housing improvements, drainage, food security and emergency response. They also help build trust, accountability and shared decision making in the community.

> Water and borehole committees – These committees handle water access, including drilling boreholes, maintenance and fair distribution. They are important in dealing with drought and water shortages and support sustainability through community management and cost-sharing.

> Climate champions – These are local leaders who raise awareness, mobilise others and take action on climate issues. They lead community-wide adaptation actions, such as clearing drains, managing waste, planting trees, helping communities to understand risks and use practical ways to adapt.

> The Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation members and youth groups – Federation members have experience with savings, mobilisation and working with authorities, and help keep the network organised and active. Youth groups add new ideas, energy and leadership around documenting climate impacts and actions.

Strengths of the network

Learning

The network enables rapid peer-to-peer sharing and learning. When Dzivarasekwa Extension cleared drains and dumpsites and partnered with Geo Pomona Waste Management for weekly waste collection, they shared updates and photos via the ISN WhatsApp group, allowing others to learn and respond immediately. Stoneridge replicated the dumpsite cleanup and is currently arranging waste collection services, while Crowborough Paddocks also struck up a strong partnership with Geo Pomona. As a result, waste reduction is accelerating across settlements, as practical examples spread more quickly than formal training.

Savings

Community savings are not only safety nets, but key to funding climate infrastructure. In Hopley, residents formed water committees and used their savings to drill five boreholes, strengthening their position in negotiations with local authorities. Crowborough adopted a similar approach, drilling one borehole and raising funds for another. Savings groups, such as those using the CashFlow model in Dzivarasekwa Extension, collected USD 1,159 in four months – funding building materials and enabling the group to start a poultry business.

Evidence

The ISN leverages evidence to engage stakeholders. Community-approved vulnerability maps and climate action plans have improved dialogue with city officials, resulting in continued conversations on the approval of technical drawings, registered boreholes and officially recognised drainage work.

The broader reform agenda

Beyond improving services, the ISN also pushes for wider urban reform. By positioning informal settlement communities as co-producers of climate resilience, it is creating a group that can take part in climate finance talks and helping to build stronger partnerships between organised citizens and government agencies. The network’s strength comes from its collective legitimacy, showing that when settlements present evidence together, they can negotiate more effectively.

But there are still major structural barriers. Tenure insecurity continues to discourage long-term investment. A lack of technical support makes it hard to move from short-term fixes to lasting infrastructure. Blended climate finance tools are needed to match communities’ savings. And there need to be ways for ISN plans to become part of city planning cycles.

The next step is to move from demonstration projects to effecting lasting changes in the city system. With the right support, this grassroots platform could attract investment, direct decentralised climate finance to the communities that need it, and turn climate plans into action.

Reshaping the city from bottom up

The ISN shows that climate resilience is not something imposed from outside, but depends on organising, sharing knowledge and managing finances together. Continuing to strengthen these communities’ connections will equip them with the solutions, strategies and influence they need to shape a more climate-resilient future for Harare and their homes.

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What a receding Harare City means for urban markets

Hannah — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Urban markets in Harare

In this blog miniseries looking at urban markets in Harare, this 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 the fourth reflects on contested market governance.

By Kudzai Chatiza

Key takeaways

The City of Harare still “owns” markets on paper but has largely withdrawn in practice. Though it still collects some fees, it is failing to provide reliable governance and basic services, including workspace infrastructure.
The vacuum the City has left is occupied by informal institutions, which are keeping markets running but making them fragile and exclusionary. This is evident in weak infrastructure, higher disaster risk and access shaped by informal power and payments.
What is needed is a different City return to markets that it previously receded from, to co-govern, coordinate (not control), secure tenure and use shared revenues tied to visible service delivery.

This blog post arises from research, concluded in May 2025, of Glen View Area 8 Furniture Complex (GV8FC) and Harare’s wider market system. The research was conducted as part of the Pundutso Urban Markets Project (PUMP) under the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC).

GV8FC was selected as a pilot site for examining institutional, governance and policy dynamics affecting informal manufacturing markets in Harare. Primary data sources included interviews and engagements with GV8FC formal and informal leaders, City of Harare officials, participants in five ACRC‐organised workshops, three Urban Informality Forum seminars, and a review of administrative and policy documentation from the City of Harare.

Understanding the “receding City”

Urban markets are often described as chaotic, informal or even unruly. But beneath this surface activity lies something more profound: a steady withdrawal of the City itself. In Harare, this phenomenon can be described as the “receding city”.

The City – both as a whole and those divisions responsible for markets – remains legally responsible for markets, but has gradually lost the ability to competently govern, provide services and sustain markets overall. The City still issues annual trader permits or licences and collects monthly levies, but not at all markets nor from all traders. Additionally, the most glaring indicator of the receding City is the failure to deliver, operate and maintain appropriate and adequate infrastructure, workspaces and basic services at markets.

In marketplaces like GV8FC, the City’s role did not disappear overnight. Instead, it slowly ebbed away. Permits were issued, then expired without being renewed. Infrastructure was planned but not fully delivered. Revenue systems were introduced and then abandoned. Over time, the City of Harare stopped being the effective authority on the ground, even though it retained legal ownership of the land and policy responsibility for the market. In variable forms, this is the situation at many other city markets.

Into the gap created by this retreat stepped market associations, politically connected committees, cooperatives and informal powerbrokers. These actors now allocate space, collect fees, resolve disputes and organise security. In practical terms, they have become the de facto managers of markets like GV8FC.

However, this is not the same as sustainable self-governance. While local organisation has kept markets alive, it has also introduced new exclusions, blind spots and vulnerabilities. The “receding City” is not simply absent. It is present enough to claim authority, but absent enough to avoid responsibility – leading to shades of strategic and operational unsustainability at markets. This contradiction shapes everything that follows regarding how markets grow, who gets access, how infrastructure is funded and who benefits from urban economies.

What the receding City means for sustainability

Market sustainability depends on more than hustle and hard work. It requires predictable governance, reliable infrastructure and credible institutions. The receding City undermines all three. At GV8FC, the absence of effective city governance has meant no stable system for financing infrastructure. Roads remain unpaved. Water and sanitation are inadequate. Fire risks are high and disaster responses are mostly reactive rather than preventative.

Without the City collecting and reinvesting revenue, collective services collapse. Individual traders may improve their own stalls, but shared infrastructure like drainage, fire breaks and access roads, which require coordinated investment by formal institutions, are not provided or, if in place, are not competently operated and maintained. This is because the institutions that fill the gaps left by the receding City struggle to sustainably perform these complex functions over time.

Ironically, the City also suffers. When revenue systems break down, income needed for planning, maintenance and service delivery is lost. This feeds a vicious cycle, whereby poor services reduce willingness to pay, and low levels of payment further weaken the City’s capacity. Overall City authority is undermined, as traders lose trust in the City’s ability to uphold the “social contract”.

Equally important is planned land use. Markets in Harare have expanded organically, with incompatible activities. At GV8FC, the main enterprise of carpentry now sits uneasily with catering, storage and retail, creating a crowded space where incompatible uses are adjacent in a complex that lacks formal layouts. This increases disaster risks, reduces productivity and makes markets harder to upgrade. In short, when the City recedes, markets survive but they do so inefficiently, vulnerably and at great long-term cost.

The second major cost of a receding City is exclusion. Urban markets are often justified as tools of inclusion and poverty reduction, providing livelihoods for those shut out of formal employment. But when governance shifts to informal systems, access increasingly depends on power, connections and informal payments, rather than transparent and inclusive rules.

At GV8FC, original permits covered fewer than 500 traders, yet several thousand now operate there. Subletting, informal allocation and politically mediated access have become normal. New entrants often gain space not through waiting lists or public processes, but through market insiders. This system excludes the very groups that social markets were designed to support.

Those at risk of missing out include women, youth and the poorest newcomers, who lack networks or capital to buy their way in. Over time, markets risk becoming closed clubs rather than open ladders which those on low incomes can use to climb out of poverty.

Tenure insecurity deepens this exclusion. Many traders believe they “own” their stalls, even without legal documentation. Others remain perpetually informal. This uncertainty discourages long-term investment, limits access to finance and fuels conflict between traders and the City. A receding City therefore produces a paradox whereby markets grow larger but become less inclusive, more politicised and harder to reform.

Why the City must return, but differently

The solution is not a return to heavy-handed enforcement or mass evictions. Our analysis of GV8FC shows that such approaches fuel resistance and deepen mistrust. Instead, what is needed is a reconfigured City role that recognises markets as permanent parts of the urban economy and invests in governing them collaboratively.

This means treating markets not as temporary poverty measures, but as productive urban assets. It also means moving beyond the false choice between total informality and rigid formality. The City must re‑enter markets as a co‑governance partner, setting clear rules, protecting public interests and enabling local institutions to function within an agreed framework. Without this, markets will remain stuck in limbo, being too informal to upgrade, while too large to ignore.

Three policy messages

Based on the policy analysis conducted at GV8FC, three policy pillars emerge. These align considerably with the City’s SME policy and the national formalisation initiatives.

Policy message 1: Reassert the City’s role as coordinator, not controller

The City of Harare can re‑enter markets to coordinate planning, infrastructure and regulation. This can be done without displacing local institutions. Clear mandates and shared authority are essential for sustainability.

Policy message 2: Secure tenure to unlock investment and inclusion

Transparent, time‑bound and transferable tenure arrangements are critical. Without them, markets cannot attract finance, plan infrastructure or remain inclusive to new entrants.

Policy message 3: Finance markets through shared revenue models

Market sustainability requires reliable revenue collection linked to visible service delivery. Co‑managed revenue systems can rebuild trust and fund infrastructure.

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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.

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Box 1: Community funds

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Further reading

Authors

Organisations

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Networking solutions: Community-led climate adaptation in Harare’s informal settlements

Community-led climate action

From global exclusion to local organisation

Connecting communities across shared challenges

Learn more | Local climate adaptation in Dzivarasekwa Extension

Strengths of the network

Learning

Savings

Evidence

The broader reform agenda

Reshaping the city from bottom up

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What a receding Harare City means for urban markets

Urban markets in Harare

Key takeaways