Building Bridges at the Grassroots: Scaling up through Knowledge-Sharing

According to this document, prepared for a Practical Action workshop at the World Urban Forum of United Nations (UN) Habitat, Barcelona, Spain, September 2004: "the towns and cities of the developing world will absorb nearly the entire global population growth between now and 2030. With the urban share of poverty predicted to increase from 30% in 2001 to 40% by 2020 and 50% by 2035, the number of people living in slums is set to double by 2030. Slums provide an unhealthy and dangerous living environment. In many countries, the prevalence of disease and rates of infant mortality are higher in slums than in rural areas; and they are a multiple greater than those in richer parts of cities. Improving the living conditions of slum dwellers and preventing the formation of news slums are among the most significant development challenges of the coming decades."

The paper proposes that the social networks of the urban economically poor are an important starting point for slum improvement. They allow slum residents to pool resources, share information, and gain influence. Slum dwellers also require information and knowledge on a range of issues from outside sources. While their own local knowledge is very valuable, information from elsewhere is often what enables them to innovate. It further states that evidence is starting to emerge that good practice can spread, and upgrading can be scaled up through exchanges of information between networks of slum dwellers and innovative uses of communication methods. This publication considers a number of such examples and begins to define some guiding principles for building bridges with grassroots organisations of people living in the slums.

Slum improvement is about making changes to the slums: changes in the ways houses or infrastructure are built, how services are provided, and how people make a living. These changes involve innovation, and local knowledge and experience may not be adequate. Slum dwellers may be reluctant to change, if they cannot assess the risks involved. They need information about how things can be done differently, how they have worked elsewhere, what the cost might be, etc. A number of general communication and information needs of the economically poor were identified:

• Health education and access to health services.
• Improved access to services and infrastructure.
• Access to small and medium sized loans.
• Income generation skills.
• Access to information on a broad range of topics including individual rights, municipal actions, and the potential benefits of various plans.

Social networks are one of the most important sources of information for people living in slums. When social networks do not provide the required information, the urban economically poor sometimes resort to key informants: people who, because of their function, role, or experience have acquired certain knowledge and are willing to share it. In many cases, though, it is social networks that allow the economically poor to identify and approach key informants.

The paper goes on to share a number of possible strategies and tools to help build access to information sharing. For example, participatory video has been used in several countries for grassroots communities to tell the story of their settlements, to indicate problems, or to record events such as enumeration exercises. Another example is resource centres, such as The Slums Information Development & Resource Centre (SIDAREC) in Pumwani, a Nairobi, Kenya, slum with about 200,000 inhabitants, which is aiming to develop the awareness and skills of young people between 15 and 35 years of age. They do so  using a range of methods: a newsletter, community theatre, audio tapes used in a weekly radio slot, youth networks, and an internet café.

Practical Action has identified guiding principles for building bridges with the grassroots:

• Slum dwellers themselves are the major actors in upgrading. They are the ones who invest most in terms of money and effort. Others are there to facilitate and encourage but not to direct.
• Community groups and organisations need to be recognised as effective partners in development. They need to be supported in: achieving capacity for making informed decisions; taking practical actions, articulating their needs to organisations such as authorities, banks, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs); and holding these organisations accountable.
• Slum dwellers possess useful knowledge and experience. The traditional one-way communication, often used in the past, must give way to dialogue.
• Peer exchanges and training are at the heart of much successful replication. That is true for slum dwellers themselves, and also for those who support them, such as NGO or local authority staff. All those can learn enormously of what others in similar positions have experienced.
• The means of communication of slum dwellers differ quite often from those commonly used by support agencies or decision makers. For effective communication between them, methods need to be adapted and adopted that suit both sides; participatory video is one of them.
• The economically poor can afford little risk. They may reject an idea from elsewhere, even if it has proven to be good practice, because it seems too far away from what they are used to, and they may have no means of testing it without spending what is for them a substantial sum. There is a need to devise ways to share and reduce these risks, i.e. through subsidising innovation, demonstration, or more detailed information.
• There is a need to find ways to include slum dwellers who are currently not well networked, because providing information mainly to community leaders or to community-based organisations that consist of active community members may not be good enough.