Kibera Concepts

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend · 29 Sep 2013 · 464pp · 127,283 words

in Kenya uncovered an astonishingly high turnover rate for new arrivals—on average, newcomers during a year-long study period in 2008–2009 stayed in Kibera, the capital’s largest slum, just less than two months.26 Anthropologist Mirjam de Bruijn has documented Bedouin caravans in the southern Sahara that have

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urban growth and a lack of investment in sanitation. In the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, in place of chamber pots the residents of the massive Kibera slum have put the ubiquitous plastic bag to work. The process is much the same, however. Squat, step to the window, and hurl. Throughout the

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have a much harder time spreading. Cholera, dispersed through London’s contaminated water supply, killed more than ten thousand people in 1853–54 alone.36 Kibera has its share of water-borne disease but nothing on that scale. Home to an estimated 250,000 residents

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, Kibera is one of Africa’s largest slums.37 But if you looked it up on Google Maps in 2008 and toggled between the satellite view

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it was gone, replaced by a blank spot drawn from a government map that still identified the area as the forest that previously stood there. Kibera’s omission spoke volumes about how officials and the public saw it. Instead of the reality of a quarter-million people striving to build a

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in just two years it had surveyed some two-thirds of Pune’s 450 slum settlements, mapping some 130,000 households. The effort to put Kibera on the map was started by two geeks from the rich world, Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron, who in 2009 joined forces with a trio

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of Kenyan community-development groups to launch Map Kibera. They recruited a handful of twentysomethings who were active in the community, one from each of the slum’s thirteen villages. With just two days

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of training in how to use consumer-grade GPS receivers, these volunteer mappers were sent out to traverse Kibera on foot, using their bodies as tools to collect traces of the thousands of streets, alleys, and paths that would form the first-ever digital

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base map of the thriving community. Results came quickly. “We did the first map in three weeks,” Maron recalls.39 The mapping technique used in Kibera was imported from an unlikely place, which was also the source of the first modern surveys of Kenya—the country’s former colonial ruler, the

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existing city-planning efforts in the hope of securing a fairer share of government resources. But with the new chart living online in OpenStreetMap, Map Kibera is focused instead on powering new tools that change how the community is represented in the media, and how organizers lobby the government to address

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local problems. Voice of Kibera, for instance, is a citizen-reporting site built using another open-source tool called Ushahidi. The name means “testimony” in Swahili, and it was developed

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in 2008 to monitor election violence in Kenya. Voice of Kibera plots media stories about the community onto the open digital map, and allows residents to send in their own reports by SMS. Another Map

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Kibera effort recruits residents to monitor the progress of infrastructure projects. Government-funded slum upgrades, such as the installation of water pumps and latrines, are hot

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the actual state of construction, frequently contradicting the government’s own claims. Over time, slowly but surely, the map is helping shift public perception of Kibera away from flying bags of crap and toward a view of a community of real people. As Maron told me, “People like living in

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Kibera. What they don’t like is having raw sewage running by their house.”41 Map Kibera represents a shift in how we think about using technology to help poor communities. We can ship all

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distress from afar through efforts like Global Pulse, but the tools to intervene once a crisis is identified haven’t changed much from yesteryear. Map Kibera demonstrates how open-source tools, put in place on behalf of poor communities, can empower them to create knowledge relevant to the problems they face

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. As Hagen described Map Kibera in a 2010 article, “It is founded on the premise that the advent of the digital age means that gatekeepers to information and data can

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technologies like the mobile phone trickle down, Heeks envisions a second shift to “per-poor” innovation, done entirely by and for the poor. While Map Kibera is clearly a para-poor project, with Westerners bringing in new technology and design ideas, it has created a framework on which per-poor innovation

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long considered those communities “chaotic masses rather than coherent urban areas,” according to Shelter Associates.44 But in both cases, governments responded achingly slowly. Map Kibera offers the hope that by using maps to power community-based initiatives, rather than simply lobby government, progress will be faster. It’s unconscionable that

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slums, with a little help from concerned outsiders slum dwellers are rewriting the map themselves.45 But it won’t happen on its own. Map Kibera’s lesson is clear—it isn’t enough to simply drop technology into poor communities. Do-gooders will have to stick around long enough to

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defy easy solution. This is as true in the poor parts of the developed world as it is in the developing countries. Moldova and Detroit, Kibera and Cleveland share many similar challenges in realizing the potential of smart technology. The first dilemma concerns access and agency. Putting technology in the hands

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to balance the privacy rights of individuals and small groups against the larger public good. Every society will have to find its own balance. While Kibera highlights the risks of being left off the official map, in many cases the poor may resist external efforts to measure and manage their communities

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of innovation will shape the way we think about the place of technology as well. For I have no doubt that right now, somewhere in Kibera or Soweto or Dharavi, some young civic hacker is cobbling together a few transformational bits of technology that will change the world. 7 Reinventing City

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_urban_planning_04.shtml. 36C. Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 858. 37While the official 2009 Kenya census tallied Kibera’s population at 170,070, two other estimates put the figure closer to 250,000. One extrapolated from a door-to-door survey in one

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of the slum’s districts, the other used satellite imagery to count structures. See Mikel Maron, “Kibera’s Census: Population, Politics, Precision,” September 5, 2010, http://www.mapkibera.org/blog/2010/09/05/kiberas-census-population-politics-precision/. 38Pratima Joshi, Srinanda Sen, and Jane Hobson, “Experiences with surveying and mapping Pune

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/01/ordnance-survey-maps-download-free. 41Maron, interview, March 27, 2012. 42Erica Hagen, “The story of Map Kibera,” IKM Emergent program wiki, http://wiki.ikmemergent.net/index.php/Workspaces:The_changing_environment_ of_infomediaries/Map_Kibera, accessed March 17, 2012. 43Heeks, “ICT4D 2.0,” 30. 44P. Joshi, S. Sen, and J. Hobson

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Motorola, 51–52 SCR-300 of, 51 MRI, 64 Mumford, Lewis, 27, 98, 105, 114 MyCityWay, 201–2 Nairobi, 184–89 Map Kibera in, 186–89 Voice of Kibera in, 187 Nath, Jay, 228–30, 300–301 National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, 197 National Science Foundation, 111, 260–61 NSFNET

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

by Oliver Burkeman · 1 Jul 2012 · 211pp · 69,380 words

church: the men in well-pressed suits, the women in dresses of fuschia and bright green, children clutching bibles. Here in the poorest part of Kibera – across the rubbish-strewn railway tracks that divided the slum proper from the rest of Nairobi – it was a challenge to keep your church clothes

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of two or three, or playing hymns on a Casio keyboard. But in the opinion of Frankie Otieno, a twenty-two-year-old resident of Kibera who spent his Sundays not worshipping but attending to his various business interests, these smaller churches were essentially scams. ‘In

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Kibera, a church is a business,’ he said, his easy smile tinged with cynicism. He was sitting on a tattered sofa in the shady main room

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of his mother’s house in Kibera, drinking Coke from a glass bottle. ‘A church is the easiest way to get money from the aid organisations. One day, you fill up your

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take photos to show their sponsors, and they give you money.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s all about the photos, you know?’ In another part of Kibera, reached by pursuing still narrower paths, deeper into the slum, then rounding a bend past a health clinic, three Kiberan men were starting their work

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nyama choma, or roasted goat meat, sizzling on an open grill nearby, wafted through the workshop, masking the odour of sewage. Commercially speaking, Sunday in Kibera was no different to any other day, and that meant it was busy. Past the bone workshop, past the street grills, down along an alley

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blue plastic sheeting, a gateway marked the official entrance to the slum’s vast market. But the boundary wasn’t obvious, because the whole of Kibera felt like a market. Along every crater-ridden lane, merchants at makeshift tables sold radios, or pineapples, or baby clothes in fluorescent colours; the navigators

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the cloth covering their home’s main room, and laughed at him. By the standards of someone from almost anywhere else, the conditions faced by Kibera’s residents – who number anywhere from 170,000 to a million, according to competing population surveys – are almost unimaginably harsh. The slum has no running

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, bringing power to Nairobi’s better-off citizens. Sexual violence is rampant. Car-jackings and opportunistic murders are a weekly occurrence. With no proper sanitation, Kibera’s primary means of disposing of human waste is what the slum-dwellers wryly refer to as ‘flying toilets’: the practice of defecating into a

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HIV. For all these reasons – and also because it is a conveniently short drive from central Nairobi, with its international airport and comfortable business hotels – Kibera has become a world-famous landmark of suffering. Prime ministers and presidents travel there for photo-opportunities; television news crews come regularly to gawp; and

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United States and Europe. Their names reflect the sense of agonised desperation for which the name ‘Kibera’ has come to stand: the Fountain of Hope Initiative; Seeds of Hope; Shining Hope for Communities; the Kibera Hope Centre; Kibera In Need. But ask Norbert Aluku, a lanky young social worker, born and raised in

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Kibera, if his childhood there was one of misery and suffering, and he will laugh at you in

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, it’s not about your conditions. It’s about taking whatever you have, and using it as best you can, together with your neighbours. In Kibera, it’s only with your neighbours that you’re going to get by.’ Or ask Irene Mueni, who lives there too, and who speaks darkly

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city. The things you need for happiness aren’t the things you think you need.’ This is the difficult truth that strikes many visitors to Kibera, and they struggle for the words to express it, aware that it is open to misinterpretation. Bluntly, Kiberans just don’t seem as unhappy or

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as depressed as one might have expected. ‘It’s clear that poverty has crippled Kibera,’ observes Jean-Pierre Larroque, a documentary filmmaker who has spent plenty of time there, ‘but it doesn’t exactly induce the pity-inducing cry for

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help that NGOs, church missions, and charity groups would have you believe.’ What you see instead, he notes, are ‘streets bustling with industry’. Kibera feels not so much like a place of despair as a hotbed of entrepreneurialism. This awkward realisation – that people living in extremely fragile circumstances seem

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surprisingly high-functioning and non-depressed – isn’t only applicable to Kibera, of course. It’s so familiar that it has become a cliché, especially regarding sub-Saharan Africa. And it is laden with problems: it coasts

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richer, industrialised regions. ‘Look, this is a thing that social scientists have often pointed out,’ Norbert told me, when I made my second visit to Kibera. We were sitting on folding chairs, in the shade cast by his onestorey office building on the outskirts of the slum. ‘Just because you have

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of happiness; even if the impressions of Jean-Pierre Larroque and others don’t capture the whole picture – why is it that places such as Kibera aren’t unequivocally at the bottom of every assessment of happiness levels, every time? A multiplicity of answers has been advanced, and none of them

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that it might be possible to live with running water, functioning toilets, and lower rates of disease. But this is certainly not the case in Kibera, whose residents live shoulder-to-shoulder with Nairobi’s fancier neighbourhoods; some of them have jobs as domestic workers there. The grand mansion of a

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senior Kenyan politician sits just a modest walk back up the road from the slum to Nairobi. In a girls’ school in the heart of Kibera, five-year-olds learn to read beneath a giant photograph of Times Square; Hollywood movies on videotape are commonplace. Norbert Aluku had even coined a

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; and that vulnerability may be a precondition for the very things that bring the greatest happiness – strong social relationships above all. What the people of Kibera and others in similar situations all share is a lack of access to those things that the rest of us self-defeatingly try to use

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is not a viable option. You have to turn and face the reality of insecurity instead. The people of Kibera are vulnerable whether they like it or not. One American working in Kibera, Paige Elenson, told me she’d been strongly affected by just this realisation. ‘I hate all that romanticism – “Oh

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onto – when there are choices you don’t have – then it changes things. You have to cut the crap.’ Speaking of crap: one day in Kibera, Norbert took me to see a project he was associated with, which involved recycling human waste into marketable biogas. This offered a new solution to

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was talking about included recycling human waste. ‘Look,’ said Frankie Otieno, drinking Coke on his mother’s sofa, when I asked him about all this, ‘Kibera is not a good place. Big problems, and a million NGOs who don’t do any good. Major, major problems. But you have to manage

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Tworkov, ‘No Right, No Wrong: An Interview with Pema Chödrön’, Tricycle, Fall 1993. ‘Things are not permanent’: Ibid. ‘It’s clear that poverty has crippled Kibera’: From Jean-Pierre Larroque, ‘Of Crime and Camels’, blog post at mediaforsocialchange.org/blog/of-crime-and-camels 22 July 2001 ‘I find it so

Lonely Planet Kenya

by Lonely Planet

Maasai communities with market visits and other encounters in Mara North. The Maa Trust Watch the Maasai benefit from the conservancy model in the Mara. Kibera Explore a Nairobi shanty town with all its complications and dynamism. Ol Pejeta Conservancy Track lions, pat a blind rhino and draw near to critically

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Kenya's story exceptionally well, while the Karen Blixen Museum returns you to the realm of Out of Africa nostalgia. For something completely different, tour Kibera, Nairobi's pulsating heart. Kenya’s Table Nairobi’s culinary variety far surpasses anything you’ll find elsewhere in the country. Here there’s everything

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orphaned baby elephants. 3 Karen Blixen's House & Museum Reliving Out of Africa nostalgia. 4 National Museum Deepening your understanding of all things Kenyan. 5 Kibera Learning how much of Nairobi lives by taking a tour through one of Africa's largest and most vibrant shanty towns. 6 Carnivore Indulging your

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well worth the journey. TTours oKibera ToursTOURS (%0721391630, 0723669218; www.kiberatours.com; per person KSh2500) This well-regarded tour of the shanty town by two Kibera residents takes you to Toi Market, an orphanage, a bead factory, a local home and a lookout point. oExplore KiberaTOURS (%072700517; www.explorekibera.com; per

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person US$29; h9am & 2pm daily) Running since 2009, these three-hour tours take you deep into the Kibera shanty town, from the famous railway tracks to markets to local beadmakers and other artisans. People to People TourismTOURS (%0722750073, 0734559710; www.peopletopeopletourism.com) This

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’s open-air manufacturing industry; it sometimes combines tours of the usual tourist sights with visits to jua kali workshops producing crafts and other goods. KIBERA Kibera (which is derived from a Nubian word, kibra, meaning forest) is a sprawling urban jungle of shanty-town housing. Home to as many as a

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million residents, Kibera is the world’s second-largest shanty town (after Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa). Although it covers 2.5 sq km in area, it’s

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of the same name by John le Carré. With the area heavily polluted by open sewers, and lacking even the most basic infrastructure, residents of Kibera suffer from disease and poor nutrition, not to mention violent crime. Although it’s virtually impossible to collect accurate statistics on shanty towns, as the

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demographics change almost daily, the rough estimates for Kibera are shocking enough. According to local aid workers, Kibera has one pit toilet for every 100 people; the shanty town's inhabitants suffer from an HIV/AIDS infection rate of

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more than 20%; and four out of every five people living here are unemployed. History The British established Kibera in 1918 for Nubian soldiers as a reward for service in WWI. However, following Kenyan independence in 1963, housing in

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Kibera was rendered illegal by the government. But this new legislation inadvertently allowed the Nubians to rent out their property to a greater number of tenants

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than legally permitted and, for poorer tenants, Kibera was perceived as affordable despite the questionable legalities. Since the mid-1970s, though, control of Kibera has been firmly in Kikuyu hands; the Kikuyu now comprise the bulk of the population. Orientation

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Kibera is located southwest of central Nairobi. The railway line heading to Kisumu intersects Kibera, though the shanty town doesn’t actually have a station. However

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, this railway line does serve as the main thoroughfare through Kibera, and you’ll find shops selling basic provisions along the tracks. Visiting the Shanty Town A visit

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to Kibera is one way to look behind the headlines and, albeit briefly, touch on the daily struggles

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aren’t always appreciated by residents. The best way to visit is on a tour. Two recommended companies are Explore Kibera and Kibera Tours. Getting There & Away You can get to Kibera by taking bus 32 or matatu 32c from the Kencom building along Moi Ave. Be advised that this route is notorious

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MAP ) leave from Kenyatta Ave, close to the corner with Posta Rd. There's a central stop ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Moi Ave) for matatus to Kibera. You should keep an eye on your valuables while on all matatus. Taxi As people are compelled to use them due to Nairobi’s endemic

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(KFC; www.kenyafilmcommission.com), which aims to support and promote the Kenyan film industry. One notable success since its inception is Kibera Kid (2006), a short film set in the Kibera slum, written and directed by Nathan Collett. It tells the story of 12-year-old Otieno, an orphan living with a

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gang of thieves, who must make a choice between gang life and redemption. Featuring a cast of children, all of whom live in Kibera, the film played at film festivals worldwide. Filmed in Kenya Born Free (1966) Out of Africa (1985) I Dreamed of Africa (2000) Lara Croft Tomb

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA

by Tonny K. Omwansa, Nicholas P. Sullivan and The Guardian · 28 Feb 2012 · 140pp · 91,067 words

hand. It is also faster than using money transfer companies and more convenient than using the formal banking system. ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* Even the Kibera slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, where over 250,000 people live cheek to jowl in highly unsanitary conditions and makeshift housing, is a beehive

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needed cash anyway they could get it. M-PESA payments started coming from the village to the city, particularly the large urban slum settlement of Kibera, a city within the city of Nairobi. Agents found that urban customers were making withdrawals instead of deposits. Once desperate for e-float, agents now

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scrambled to find cash with the banks closed. Olga Morawczynski, an anthropologist who studied money flows between Kibera and the farming village of Bukura in Western Kenya, observed this dramatic shift. The shift was temporary, but significant—money was flowing at the so

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price (as much s 30% a year) to have that collector take away their savings and store them safely until needed.” SAVING IN THE SLUMS Kibera is one of the largest slums in Africa, an informal settlement on government-owned land—which is not serviced by the government with streets, electricity

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, water, or sewers. In Kibera, as in other poor areas, MPESA helps people to store and save money. While there is some debate about the extent to which mobile phones

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on withdrawals that serves as an effective commitment feature preventing haphazard withdrawal for consumption spending—something that makes mobile money a hit for the poor.” Kibera is at once one of the world’s most depressing and most uplifting spots. Depressing because it is hard to imagine life in an “informal

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Uganda roars through every day scattering children playing on the tracks. Aside from a few batteryoperated lights and illegally spliced electric lines, Kibera is dark at night. But Kibera is also uplifting for the civilization it has built, its electronics shops and beauty shops and clothing shops and furniture stalls and brilliant

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health and circumstances and luck and how hard they work. And one way to do that is by mobilizing money. Lukas Alube grew up in Kibera, got an education (library science) and got out—but is now working there under the auspices of the Anglican Church to help residents mobilize money

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savings groups, and many in turn have spread the gospel and knowledge to others. Charles Oronje, for example, a skilled furniture maker who lives in Kibera, started the Gatwikera Railway Savings Club in 2004; three years later, the group counted 54 members, many of whom disappeared during the post-election violence

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. “In my own groups, I have to start very simply,” Lukas told Kim Wilson, a microfinance specialist at The Fletcher School, who visited Kibera. “With ‘dear ones’ [the poorest of the poor] I must begin at the beginning. These members are often new to

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Kibera, are out of money, frightened, and a little desperate.” The basic group is a merry-go-round, a savings mechanism used by the poor around

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, groups can send as little as $3 per month to top up their Zimele accounts. People in Kibera, often living on pennies a day, are investing in the stock market as a route out of Kibera. This would not be possible without M-PESA, without people’s trust in the system, without

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, but can address larger, long-term issues such as burial savings, school fees and ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* neighborhood safety. Jua kali Most people in Kibera work in the “informal sector.” The term “informal sector” was popularized by a 1972 study of Kenya, but Kenyans have another term for the sector

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graduated from high school or even from technical colleges but cannot find work in the formal sector. Jua kali, of course, are not restricted to Kibera in Nairobi, nor are they necessarily urban—many live in rural areas. An estimated 8 million Kenyans (nearly half of Kenya’s 18 million workforce

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informal sector had no retirement or pension plans, making the Mbao scheme an extremely positive development. CASH CIRCULATES IN REMOTE VILLAGES Once normal urban-rural, Kibera-Bukura remittance patterns took hold again after the post-election violence subsided, one of anthropologist ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* Morawczynski’s more stunning findings was

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, phones, roads, hospitals. It costs too much to reach too few people to build a reliable infrastructure. Even inner-city or periurban slums, such as Kibera, where providers could theoretically reach a million people, qualify as “remote,” in that they are walled off from the grid that the developed world connects

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Kenyans.” Imagine 50 other countries with huge proportions of unbanked citizens inhaling a similar breath of fresh air into their economies. Like many residents of Kibera, Mercy, a stocky woman with close-cropped hair and bright eyes, comes from a rural “upcountry” area of Kenya. She moved to

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Kibera 15 years ago, she says, because of low rent and a relative who could help her find a job and a place to live. Her

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house is a typical Kibera shack with a corrugated tin roof and mud floor. Bed sheets hang from the ceiling to divide the structure into separate sections to afford a

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not vary with the season—unlike fresh produce, for example. Before the fish business, she sold groceries along a main road on the outskirts of Kibera, which she describes as a much less consistent income. Mercy has built what she describes as a very stable client base for her wholesale fish

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up

by Philip N. Howard · 27 Apr 2015 · 322pp · 84,752 words

New World Mapping Hispaniola Dictators and Dirty Networks Mubarak’s Choice We Are All Laila Governments, Bad and Fake The Dictator’s Digital Dilemma Finding Kibera Dirty Networks, Collapsing The Democracy of Devices 4. Five Premises for the Pax Technica Learning from the Internet Interregnum First Premise: The Internet of Things

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politics, and yet again when citizens demand access to the latest televisions, phones, and other consumer electronics that constitute the internet of things. Finding Kibera The Map Kibera project in Nairobi, Kenya, is one example of how this process has helped a marginalized community figure out its strengths and understand its needs

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one of its toughest slums. Once there he found a community with immense amounts of economic, cultural, and social capital that had no strong institutions. Kibera is a place where hundreds of thousands of people live. For decades it has been politically invisible because no public map recognized the boundaries of

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the real number is, it is an enormous area and a blank spot on the map until 2009. In fact, many government maps still identify Kibera as a forest. Even Google Maps reveals few details for one of the most crowded and impoverished slums on the planet. By itself Nairobi has

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.18 Gathering a group of volunteer “trackers” equipped with some basic consumer electronics, including cheap GPS devices and mobile phones, Kovačič and his colleagues “found” Kibera. They identified two hundred schools. They located thirty-five pharmacies. They charted hip bars with late-night dancing, and they found quiet corners where people

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were covering these problems, small groups of neighbors were working on specific issues, and politicians were alerted. Not only did Primož Kovačič help to find Kibera, but he also helped the community find itself. Social media lowered the cost of collaboration to a point where resource-constrained actors—like

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Kibera’s inhabitants—could agree to solve their problems. Not everybody was happy about this, of course. Elders and district officers expected bribes. The police didn’

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way that lets others act on it. When I asked Kovačič about the impact of the project, he looked back at the digital map of Kibera. “The important outcome is not the dots on the map,” he said. “It’s about the social capital and ties that come because of the

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young citizens in Egypt. Meier built his own network of international volunteers for reconstruction in Haiti. Kovačič built his own network of people within Kibera, to serve Kibera. Wherever and whenever governments are in crisis, in transition, or in absentia, people are using digital media to try to improve their conditions, to

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have lost the exclusive power to frame current events. When governments fail, people repair their institutions with digital media. Monterrey’s public alert systems and Kibera’s mapping project, discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, are examples of how this can work. James Scott is an anthropologist famous for demonstrating how

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September 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/29/outgunned-ukrainian-army-crowdfunding-people-drone. 15. “Map Kibera,” accessed June 20, 2014, http://mapkibera.org/. 16. Brian Ekdale, “Slum Tourism in Kibera: Education or Exploitation?” Brian Ekdale’s Blog, July 13, 2010, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.brianekdale.com

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/slum-tourism-in-kibera-education-or-exploitation/. 17. Robert Neuwirth, The Hidden World of Shadow Cities, TEDGlobal, 2005, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_neuwirth_

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Bank, December 2012), accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.infodev.org/infodev-files/final_kenya_bop_study_web_jan_02_2013_0.pdf. 13. “Map Kibera,” accessed June 20, 2014, http://mapkibera.org/. 14. David Daw, “10 Twitter Bot Services to Simplify Your Life,” TechHive, October 23, 2011, accessed September 30

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Telecommunications Union Japan, fighting piracy, 98 Joint Threat Intelligence Group, 31 Jordan, Arab Spring in, 156 Jubilee 2000, 49–50 Karber, Phillip, 193 Kenya: Map Kibera project in, 88–91; money transfer in, 159–60; slums in, 83 Kiberia mapping project, 120 Kickstarter.com, 86, 105, 161 Kiirti platform, 171 Kissinger

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groups in, 80–81 Maluf, Paulo, 253 malware, 30, 113–14, 115–16 Mandela, Nelson, 52 Mandiant, 38, 39 Manning, Chelsea, xxii, 235, 238 Map Kibera, 88–91 mapping, 70–71, 88–91, 101; of dirty networks, 98; refuting government claims, 176–77; social-media, 157–58 maps: disconnection with, 67

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson · 5 Feb 2019 · 280pp · 83,299 words

modern business. But a few kilometers from downtown Nairobi—a short, white-knuckle ride by matatu, the local minibuses Kenyans use to get around—is Kibera. The most populous slum in Africa, and maybe the world, is home to about a quarter million souls.190

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Kibera represents the flip side of the dual realities of Nairobi: Downtown. Kibera. The place is an assault on the senses, beginning with an overload of the color red. Red rust stains the tin

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dirt roads and paths is red. The smell, for a pampered Westerner, is hard to describe or forget. There are no formal sanitary facilities in Kibera, and open sewers run wherever there is open ground. There are also random piles of garbage, with adults, children, and animals picking through them. To

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Western eyes, Kibera is dystopic, hopeless squalor. Not so for Kenyans. To them, Kibera is a community with a distinct culture and purpose. It is as much Nairobi as the modern downtown

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. Kibera is also the seat of the traditional economy. It is overrun with informal businesses—food stalls, small grocers, butchers, secondhand clothing stores, repair shops. Some

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a piece of recycled hardware, or for a part for an older car. Whatever they need is on offer in Kibera, and at a better price than in any modern store. Kibera is also the home for new arrivals—either migrants from the countryside or those moving from other communities. Manhattan a

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century ago had its Lower East Side; Nairobi today has Kibera. While poverty, terrible sanitation, social pathologies (such as alcohol abuse and teen pregnancies), corruption, and crime are all rampant, these don’t make the community

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a no-go zone for Kenyans from other parts of Nairobi. Kibera is a distinct center for cultural and commercial interactions, like any historical ethnic enclave in a major Western city. Think the Latin Quarter, Little Italy

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, or Chinatown. Not today’s versions, but the way these places looked a few generations ago. There’s a lot going on in Kibera. Whether he lives in Kibera, a leafy, affluent neighborhood, or something in between, a Kenyan’s personal identity is rooted in tribe, clan, and family. These loyalties supersede

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’s worlds away from what greets us. The accommodation in Vila Prudente is sturdier and more permanent than what is on offer in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. But the random piles of human detritus—garbage, broken bricks, and broken asphalt—are similar, as is the sour smell of rotting garbage. After

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“Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, 2014” (Nairobi: Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2015). https://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/FR308/FR308.pdf 190 “Kibera Facts and Information,” Kibera-UK. http://www.kibera.org.uk/facts-info 191 Interview with Darrell Bricker. All interviews in this chapter were conducted on a confidential basis. 192 “Corruption

Arrival City

by Doug Saunders · 22 Mar 2011 · 366pp · 117,875 words

Gong Li, China Tower Hamlets, London, U.K. 2. OUTSIDE IN: THE LIVES OF THE NEW CITY Kolhewadi, Ratnagiri, India Kamrangirchar, Dhaka, Bangladesh Shenzhen, China Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 3. ARRIVING AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID Los Angeles, California Herndon, Virginia, and Wheaton, Maryland 4

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not want to meet the fate of Shenzhen, a wound that will not heal, a place nobody can call home. ARRIVAL POSTPONED: THE STUCK CITY Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya Eunice Orembo, her four sons, and her daughter spend their mornings and nights in a single room, ten by seven meters, its walls

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, pungent cluster of almost unimaginably high population density built on hillocks of refuse near the heart of Nairobi. This is the Kianda neighborhood in the Kibera slum, whose inhabitants, numbering close to a million, are perhaps the largest and most infamous slum community in sub-Saharan Africa, subject to disease infestations

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and bursts of political and gang violence on a terrifying scale. At the end of 2007, Kibera exploded into months of murderous political violence, in which members of the Luo tribe drove Kikuyus out of their neighborhoods, making this an even more

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ethnically segregated, and dangerous, place. Kibera, like most African slums, is a true arrival city. Though it has existed here for 90 years, created when Kenya’s colonial administration granted some

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African city. Eunice and her sons agreed she should make the move herself, in 2001, using a network of established people from her district within Kibera to find a landlord willing to rent her a hut. “We wanted to try to live again, to see if life could change,” she recalls

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only alternative is the alarmingly popular “flying toilet,” in which a plastic bag filled with waste is flung out the window at night, contributing to Kibera’s mountain of stench. Getting into the proper city, less than a kilometer away, is damningly difficult, an odyssey of perilous and unhygienic lanes leading

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on the street who turn to theft, drug dealing, or the brewing and selling of homemade liquor to get by, a social stew that prevents Kibera from developing into a successful arrival city. For the privilege of living here, Eunice pays a landlord $17 a month, around half her typical monthly

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are Eunice’s chances of owning her own property. This lack of secure tenure, more than anything, has contributed to the failure of places like Kibera: If you can’t own your house, it is very hard to rise above your circumstances.20 The solution, in theory at least, is just

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growing cluster of neat, gray, high-rise buildings, with red roofs and small concrete balconies, the site of an expansive slum-redevelopment project, to which Kibera’s residents are, theoretically, to be moved into stable, sanitary, fully-owned apartment housing. It is a project initiated by UN-HABITAT, the United Nations

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human-settlements agency, whose world headquarters happen to be within walking distance of Kibera. That such a redevelopment project could only be launched three decades after the U.N. set up shop here is telling. That Eunice Orembo believes

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there. “The slums are commonly referred to as large open-air markets,” writes the South African urban planner Marie Huchzermeyer in her study of the Kibera project. “One cannot accurately foresee from outside how an intervention will impact on communities, households and individuals, their income generation and their access to basic

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, the physical benefits of the state were delivered. This is the sort of program that Kenya’s government couldn’t afford to attempt in the Kibera slum: It upgrades all the slum homes, and the infrastructure around them, to developed-world standards, without moving anyone out. Less visible but more significant

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there is a risk that the neighborhood will become inaccessible to any future arrivals. Upgrading rehousing projects to legal minimum standards, as we saw in Kibera, Nairobi, in chapter 2, can price them beyond the rural-arrival market. But, today, a number of approaches to slum improvement do not distort the

It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong · 9 Apr 2009 · 403pp · 125,659 words

stones. The first rows of the crowd hunched their shoulders and hoped it would get no worse: there were plenty of kids up there from Kibera slum, the sprawl of rusty shacks that stretched like an itchy brown sore across the modern city landscape, and they had a nasty habit of

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accept to die of hunger when the smell of your chapattis is wafting over the wall.”’ The biggest slum is Kibera, virtually an obligatory stop these days on visiting VIPs' itineraries. Kibera, bizarrely, lies within a tee shot's distance of Nairobi's golf club. Aerial photographs show the neat green medallion

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the corrugated-iron mabati roofs of between 800,000 and 1.2 million residents, prompting the immediate mental query: ‘Why don't they just invade?’ Kibera is where the phrase ‘flying toilets’ was added to the English language, a description of the method used to dispose of faeces – dump it in

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regular electricity, tarred roads or clean water, it offers hope of a different kind. If your children miraculously survive to the age of five in Kibera, they will go on to receive a far better education than their rural equivalents, and in that education lie untold possibilities. By the late 1990s

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, controllable areas during the Emergency years. The newer ones started out that way, but the phenomenon didn't last long. Often dubbed a Luo settlement, Kibera itself actually contains forty-two separate tribes, ‘all doing their jig together’, as an official from the UN's Habitat told me. Ethnicity blurred in

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playgrounds, schools, universities and offices. ‘When people first arrive in Kibera, they initially go to where their people are and look for work. They arrive with nothing, so to cut costs they sleep six to a

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from the developing world is of little relevance: these men – and they are almost always men – did not grow up in the local equivalent of Kibera. If they had, one suspects their view of the government of the day would be somewhat more jaundiced and confrontational. As it is, most regard

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‘aspirational’ segment of Kenyan society was not in fact its small middle class, but the millions of exasperated inhabitants of Korogocho, Dandora, Mathare Valley and Kibera? And what would happen when those Kenyans finally registered that while a tiny elite was ‘eating’ as never before, their own, more modest aspirations were

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. As Bill Clinton said in another context: ‘It's the economy, stupid.’ This violence was horribly up-close and personal. In Korogocho, Mathare, Dandora and Kibera, neighbour raped neighbour, husband murdered wife, schoolmate killed schoolmate. As Wangui Wa Goro, a London-based commentator, put it: ‘When you're unleashing decades of

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youth would serve as midwives to the birth of a cosmopolitan, united nation looked like idealistic nonsense – the worst violence took place in places like Kibera and Mathare, and it was committed by youngsters. For crime reporter Robert Ochola, the experience had the vividness of a lightning strike. ‘I was in

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–5, 265–6, 311–12; Moi and 5, 7, 68, 284–5; Mount Kenya Mafia and 72–4, 85, 172–3, 245; speeches 5, 72 Kibera slum, Nairobi 1, 149, 190 Kikuyu people: birth of tribe 101–3; burial of 147–8; Central Association 106; character of 43, 103–14, 115

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

by Madhumita Murgia · 20 Mar 2024 · 336pp · 91,806 words

clothes stick to your skin by nine o’clock, Ian Koli is waiting for me outside Connie’s Coffee Corner, a busy cafe in the Kibera neighbourhood of Nairobi, Kenya. As I introduce myself, we are joined by Ian’s friend and former co-worker Benjamin Ngito, who is loping towards

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walking us to his new home which he shares with his wife and four-month-old baby in the heart of Kibera. ‘Things are different,’ he says. The neighbourhood of Kibera in central Nairobi is an informal settlement, or a slum, one of the largest in Africa that houses some of the

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-PESA services, the African digital wallet that is ubiquitous here. A pungent scent of slick garbage, heat and humans sits heavily in the still air. Kibera is a complex, amorphous organism with its own villages, tribes and social classes. There’s an unspoken hierarchy here. Up the hill from where we

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to their backs. They nod in greeting. Ian leads me to the last home on the left. A single naked bulb lights the neat space. Kibera’s soundtrack of hip-hop is muffled and faraway in here. A whirring desk fan roars in the sudden quiet. ‘My home,’ Ian says. ‘Karibu

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of Hollywood and Bollywood films and series. In late 2020, Sama teamed up with local telecoms providers to lay fibre broadband in large swathes of Kibera and elsewhere in the city to allow its agents to work from their homes during the pandemic. Ian was one of the workers whose homes

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, I’m building his car!’ Ian wants to eventually start his own business, a dream of many Nairobi locals I meet both within and outside Kibera. ‘You know, causing chaos on the streets, that was the order of the day,’ he says. ‘You pick it up from your brothers and sisters

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is opening a bar. He’s dabbled in selling water and electricity, lucrative businesses controlled by powerful cartels in Kibera. In his spare time, he’s a youth leader in Lindi, one of Kibera’s villages, where he helps prepare kids for formal office-based jobs. ‘I have been able to instil

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won’t imagine it, you’ll say I’m lying.’ The mention of crime chastens Benja. He looks at Ian. ‘I wanna move out of Kibera by next year. And I want you to move too.’ ‘It is in my plan, in three years coming, I should be out of

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Kibera,’ Ian says. ‘But then you have to speed it up.’ Benja cautions him. ‘You have a responsibility to leave. I always told you, hey, you

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Juncosa, Maripi ref1 Kafka, Franz ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Kaiser, Lukasz ref1 Kampala, Uganda ref1, ref2, ref3 Kellgren & Lawrence classification system. ref1 Kelly, John ref1 Kibera, Nairobi ref1 Kinzer, Stephen: All the Shah’s Men ref1 Knights League ref1 Koli, Ian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

by Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller · 3 Feb 2015 · 202pp · 8,448 words

what your problem may be. If you still have doubts about the power of ordinary hobbits like our good friend Kathy, consider the residents of Kibera. The biggest slum in Nairobi, Kenya—and by some accounts the largest slum in the world, with as many as ve million people huddling together

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in squalor—Kibera presented its residents with all the threats you’d expect to nd in one of the world’s worst hellholes. The landscape was terrifying. There

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almost certain to be robbed. And then there were the ying toilets. Since there wasn’t a widespread or e cient sewer system in the Kibera slum, many residents were forced to do their business in ditches along the streets. But at night, when it was too dangerous for people to

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bathroom in a plastic bag, tied it up, and tossed it out the window: a ying toilet. Needless to say, there were plastic bags everywhere. Kibera, as you could imagine, was not an easy place to live in. In order to survive, you needed to really know your way around. Sadly

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ying toilets. But the fundamentals of the slum weren’t e ectively addressed. Things started to change only when the community decided to work together. Kibera’s residents united themselves and began with simple tasks. The rst was to map out their neighborhoods. A map of the slum, after all, could

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and hundreds more. Taking note of the project, the United Nation Children’s Fund got involved and doled out some cash. Soon every resident of Kibera could receive maprelated alerts via text messages sent directly to their cell phones, a service that helped people stay clear of everyday crime and outbreaks

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of violence in the neighborhood. Block by block, district by district, the Kiberans were reclaiming their community. The young men and women in Kibera are prime examples of people power harnessed to great use. Unlike many of the other examples in this book, these guys didn’t seek out

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another to bring a sense of safety to their friends and families. That’s always a strong vision of tomorrow. Although the residents of the Kibera slum were disappointed in their government and disillusioned by their institutions, they still believed that they had the ability to make positive changes on their

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, Cecilia, Slobo, Sinisa, Misko, Breza, Rasko, Imran Zahir, Harvey Milk, Itzik Alrov, Andy Bichlbaum, Rachel Hope, Chris Nahum, Manal al-Sharif, our young friends from Kibera, or our Georgian comrades Nini or Georgi, you’ll nd sitting still to be a di cult thing to do. And while today we’re

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, 2011. Chapter XI: It Had to Be You 1. Since there wasn’t a widespread or e cient sewer system in the Kibera slum: Andrew Harding, “Nairobi Slum Life: Into Kibera,” BBC.com, October 4, 2004. About the Authors SRDJA POPOVIC is a Serbian political activist and executive director of the Centre