Empowerment of Slum Children in Developing Countries Through Information Technology: Human Capabilities Versus Environmental Determinism

Urban migration in developing countries is expected to increase the number of slum inhabitants from 940 million in 2003 to over two billion by 2030. As socio-economic status at birth is a strong predictor of future socio-economic status, slum children seem destined to a life of poverty. However, emerging examples of empowerment appear to demonstrate possibilities of information technology to benefit the lives of slum children. In this paper, we use social cognitive theory to study why children participate in IT learning in the absence of formal training courses, using the constructs of symbolizing, forethought, visceral, self-regulating and self-reflecting human capabilities. In doing this, we attempt to validate a theoretical basis for human capabilities of slum children to overcome the forces of environmental determinism working against them

Travelling knowledges: urban poverty and slum/shack dwellers international

The relationship between knowledge and development is of growing importance in development theory and practice. Despite the growth in interest, there are significant issues that have not been explored in detail. I will focus on some of these issues, including: the ways in which knowledge and learning are conceived and created in development; the ways in which knowledge travels; the opportunities for learning between 'North' and 'South'; and the political spaces that are created through different kinds of knowledge. To explore these issues, I examine a network of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community-based organisations (CBOs) called Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI). This network seeks to reconfigure the governance of urban poverty reduction strategies and encourage poor' people to re-think their own capacities and potentials. In particular, I draw on interview-based fieldwork conducted on one key member of this group, the Indian Alliance based in Mumbai. I critically examine some of the possibilities and challenges of various forms of 'travelling knowledges'. These are strategies that have travelled through exchanges, wherein groups of poor people travel from one settlement to another to share stories and experiences with other poor people in what amounts to an informal 'training' process. By examining exchanges between SDI and groups in the UK, I critically discuss the broader potential in development to move beyond barriers of North and South that limit learning. I adopt a broadly post-rationalist approach to the concerns in the thesis. Through this, I argue the importance of considering knowledge and learning as produced through relations of near and far, social and material, and as driven by routines and practices. A post-rationalist approach helps us to understand and appreciate the importance of geography for knowledge and learning in the SDI network. This approach draws attention to power. It encourages a critical consciousness that is alert to the kinds of knowledge conceived for development, and that recognizes the various ways in which different knowledges help create different types of politics. A post-rationalist approach also cautions against conceptions of knowledge and learning that risk marginalizing geography and power in development more generally. The thesis demonstrates the need to give further consideration of how knowledge is conceived as a development strategy, and what the potential possibilities and pitfalls of travelling knowledges are

Urban Poverty, Local Governance and Everyday Politics in Mumbai

This book explores the informal (political) patronage relations between the urban poor and service delivery organisations in Mumbai, India. It examines the conditions of people in the slums and traces the extent to which they are subject to social and political exclusion. Delving into the roles of the slum-based mediators and municipal councillors, it brings out the problems in the functioning of democracy at the ground level, as election candidates target vote banks with freebies and private-sector funding to manage their campaigns. Starting from social justice concerns, this book combines theory and insights from disciplines as diverse as political science, anthropology and policy studies. It provides a comprehensive, multi-level overview of the various actors within local municipal governance and democracy as also consequences for citizenship, urban poverty, gender relations, public services, and neoliberal politics. Lucid and rich in ethnographic data, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and students of social anthropology, urban studies, urban sociology, political science, public policy and governance, as well as practitioners and policymakers.</p

Where Information Society and Community Voice Intersect

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) development initiatives have begun to acknowledge the power and importance of cultural and community-focused belief systems. Yet the vast majority of such initiatives tend to Pre-identify developmental goals that communities hold. Paulo Freire’s writings have influenced development initiatives by introducing the possibility of working with communities to orient projects. While these “participatory” initiatives have involved soliciting community feedback relative to a research project whose goals were formulated in the university or development institution, they do not go far enough to harness to actual visions held by communities. It is important to conceptualize a model and methodology of engaging communities to develop and articulate their own goals of information access and ultimately, an indigenous approach toward cultural, political, and economic aspects of development. This approach holds promise to sustain within communities and return on the investment and efforts of the researcher or institution. This paper closes by describing a current initiative in Southern India that reflects the described methodology

Nurturing emergent agency: networks and dynamics of complex social change processes in Raipur, India

This thesis takes up the question, how can agency for people living in informal settlements be strengthened? To address this question, I carried out systemic action research with two NGO partners and residents from seven informal settlements in Raipur, India. This involved organizing ‘slum improvement committees’ (SICs) in each of the seven settlements and carrying out joint actions in support of housing rights and implementation of the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) housing policy. The data on which my analysis is based includes over one hundred conversations between myself and the project participants (both from the settlements as well as the partner NGOs), records of two public events, a social network survey of 46 people living in the participating settlements, a separate set of 9 participatory social network maps (NetMaps), and over two hundred pages of my own field notes based on my observations and participation in the research activities. My thesis makes an original contribution to the study of community agency by analysing it through the lens of complex systems theories and utilising the tools of social network analysis. My thesis also makes an original contribution to research methodology by making the technical analysis participatory, accessible, and useful for the participants. This allowed me to combine analysis of relational structures (social networks) with relational dynamics to show how significant social change happened over the course of the project. My thesis suggests that agency can be strengthened through an organizing practice that brings NGOs, academic researchers, and residents of informal settlements together to build relational power, take collective action, and create social change

How a utility and its street-level bureaucrats connected the poor in Bangalore

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-275).This dissertation is about how urban water utilities behave and what makes them interested in serving the poor. The infrastructure literature tends to treat public service agencies as monolithic entities and to ignore the great diversity of tasks and behavior patterns within them. As a consequence, common explanations for why utilities fail poor people tend to focus on attributes of the external environment in which utilities sit and not on the potential to elicit interest from within. This research corrects for this bias by applying a "street-level bureaucracy" approach to a study of a large urban water utility. The aim is to quash the notion so common in the water literature of a unified agency operating on the supply side and to rekindle an interest in the actions of workers. To do this, I examine the case of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) and its contrasting outcomes within the same case. Over a five year period from 2000 to 2005, the utility revised its operational policies to accommodate the legal and financial realities of slums and connected 5,000 households or five percent of the slum population to the water network. Although the BWSSB demonstrated an unusual commitment to the poor, its efforts were not an unmitigated success. Progress was slow and staff failed to connect households to the network in many of the slums targeted. This dissertation digs deep inside the utility to explain these contrasting outcomes holding the city, the agency, and the sector efficiency constant. I find that while external pressures were necessary to prompt a business-as-usual utility to take action in slums, variation in outcome can be explained by the different facets of engineering life in BWSSB service stations and the different kinds of relationships forged between frontline staff and slum dwellers.(cont.) Specifically, a "willingness to supply" by engineers and the attainment of neighborhood deals were necessary conditions for a successful program outcome. This dissertation shows how these two conditions were met and highlights the critical role of the utility's Social Development Unit on both counts. It also shows how, in the process, certain kinds of conflict and resistance to reform had surprisingly positive effects. The main policy implications are that incentives must be aligned within utilities to elicit engineer buy-in and that well-staffed social development units are necessary to diffuse a new slum program to utility employees, to broker deals with slum dwellers, and to harness the benefits of resistance.by Geneviève Connors.Ph.D

IN_SITU - An investigation of functions and future strategies for Leprosy Colony

The world is urbanizing and many cities in developing countries are unable to accommodate the masses of new city residents. Slums are an immediate response to this process, and in India over 50% of the urban population lives in slums. Different ideas and methods of slum reduction have been present in India during the 20th century, which started off with a focus on slum clearance. As pure slum clearance eventually turned out to be unsuccessful in practise as slum dwellers remained unable to integrate in the formal housing market, but simply rebuilt their huts illegally, clearance in combination with resettling on a new location instead became the prevailing idea. This method is still in practice in India, and pre-fabricated residential buildings (often in form of multi-storey slab blocks) are built by the government all over the country. Through the work of many NGO’s, new ways of handling urban slums are however coming. Slum upgrading where the existing structures are upgraded insitu in collaboration with the slum community is an increasingly used method, although still in very small scale. SPARC, a major actor on the Indian NGO scene, has for example tried to use these methods in a slum upgrading project in Pune where only selected houses of poor quality were demolished and rebuilt, and the rest was upgraded. The problem is that these alternative ideas of slum rehabilitation are still rare, and the dominating methods of pre-fabricated, multi-storey projects are generally unsuccessful. On the wide-ranging level, one could say that they are unsustainable; socially (because they alter the slum dwellers’ social networks), economically (because they are not adapted to slum dwellers’ economic situation and income-generating strategies) and environmentally (because they don’t take existing structures and materials in consideration).In Bangalore in Karnataka, southern India, the number of slum dweller is lower than the national average, but still high enough to involve around two million people. Bangalore is a segregated city with remains of separation from colonial times. Gated communities and secure shopping malls arise next to small slum pockets. As the “high-tech” capital of India, it is rapidly expanding, and a new metro line is under construction. 1,200 of Bangalore’s slum dwellers live in Leprosy Colony, an old leprosy slum close to the central railway station. The settlement is old and overcrowded and lacks sanitary facilities and clean water. However, the slum also displays some fine qualities in terms of variation, flexibility, human scale, street life and social capital, as well as 40% stable, permanent buildings which could be upgraded rather than demolished.The aim of the thesis is to gain a greater understanding of the use, functions and potential improvements of slum settlements, with the focus on Leprosy Colony. It intends to look at slum rehabilitation issues from a planner’s perspective, of public space and of the role and layout of a ‘non-planned’ settlement. The project have been carried out through a differentiated methodological approach of literature analysis; observation; documentation; interviews and proposal work, where the literature analysis and proposal work were performed mainly in Sweden, and observation, documentation and interviews were carried out mainly in India. The proposal work resulted in a slum upgrading proposal for Leprosy Colony, IN_SITU, built up by six conceptual strategies; Improved connectivity; rail and road bridging structures; reinforced network of public realm; a flexible anti-flood system; incremental housing; framework for neighborhood expansion. These form a proposal of a flexible character, which takes its departure in the existing conditions and possibilities of the slum

Infrastructures of consent: interrogating citizen participation mandates in Indian urban governance

How does the state ‘perform’ people’s participation and public consultation exercises in a context where it is increasingly forced to rely on private capital to build infrastructure? How do these new forms of participation and consultation articulate with existing institutions of people’s representation? Are the new mandates for citizen participation and public consultation that are written into the reform agenda driving a further wedge into the already fractured citizenship that characterizes the Indian urban polity? These are the questions posed by this paper. While ‘participatory development’ itself has come under critique since the late 1990s for its demonstrated effects of disenfranchising marginalised groups, manufacturing consensus for plans already made, and/or closing off alternative pathways for transformation, this paper argues that contemporary practices of public consultation and citizen participation have moved out of the ambit of such critiques. No longer do they contain more than tokenistic gestures toward broad inclusion or people’s empowerment. Instead, the imperatives of ‘fast-tracking’ India’s cities into a post-Third World regime of ‘global cities’, have given new shape and meaning to contemporary practices of participation and consultation. The paper explores notions of participation as located in ‘second generation’ or institutional reforms, particularly as articulated by prominent state-sponsored public-private partnerships such as the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) and the Tamilnadu Urban Development Fund (TNUDF). These ‘model’ partnerships provided key programmatic elements that became the basis of national reform programs, notably the Jawarharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The paper also discusses the emerging character of collective action in Indian cities in terms of its implications for the unfolding of governance reform measures such as the JNNURM’s Community Participation Law

Pro-Poor Housing Rights for Slum Dwellers: The Case Against Evictions in Bangalore

According to the Housing and Land Rights Network, from 2002-2012, around 2,676,652 people were victims of violations on housing and land rights in India. Slum evictions demolish a dweller’s shelter, and destroy the few belongings that dwellers have been able to acquire. They force slum dwellers to settle in other areas of the city, where housing conditions are worse and prospects for better jobs diminished. Thus, consequences of evictions can severely affect the livelihood of already impoverished and vulnerable people. Not surprisingly, the principal concern of slum dwellers who lack formal housing rights, is the threat of eviction. This Master’s Project aims to contribute to the body of policy-oriented research that focuses on housing rights and the protection from eviction of slum dwellers in Bangalore. The study evaluates the political economy context and identifies shortcomings of slum policy and ‘pro-poor’ efforts in relation to the protection of slum dwellers from eviction, focusing on the ten-year period of 2002-2012. The analysis reveals a significant gap between housing policy and housing needs, as those who need security of tenure the most, are generally unable to afford the costs of affordable housing alternatives offered by the government. This vulnerable segment of the population is also highly susceptible to evictions, which further threatens the stability of their livelihood. Perversely, even policies crafted at the central and state levels to address the vulnerabilities of the poorest city dwellers are not being implemented in a comprehensive, transparent and efficient manner by the respective public institutions. Additionally, standards and regulations tend to facilitate eviction processes and provide little protection from eviction or housing alternatives for unlawful dwellers. The gap between policy and the needs of the poor is further aggravated by the dwellers’ lack of information on their rights and the limited influence that vulnerable slum dwellers have on shaping reform. NGOs and other civil society actors have been working to advocate on behalf of the poor and advance their right to housing. Nevertheless, collective action problems and limited resources keep them from increasing the impact of their efforts. The research results of this study have led to the following recommendations: 1. NGOs should build the capacity of slum leaders and any emergent CBOs to pursue housing rights and protect themselves from eviction. CBOs and slum leaders should be trained on notification processes and other related tasks that can help advance the community’s agenda. 2. NGOs should reprioritize their work, increasing investment of resources in a few specific key areas of work to maximize impact. By implementing recommendation 1, CBOs will take some responsibility away from NGOs, allowing NGOs to focus more on implementing specific and complex strategies. Some of these include: i) raising awareness nationally and globally on the vulnerability of the poorest slum dwellers, ii) seeking the courts help for the advancement of housing rights as well as safety nets around eviction, and iii) advocating at the central and state levels for the further development and actual implementation of ‘pro-poor’ policies, including schemes on night shelters, temporary housing, and property rights

Interwoven threads: building a labour countermovement in Bangalore's export-oriented garment industry

This paper approaches globalisation as a contradictory and dialectical phenomenon, one in which the tools of exploitation are being subverted into instruments of labour resistance. Through a study of the Garment and Textile Workers' Union (GATWU) the paper observes how feminised workplaces are bringing to the fore issues of gender oppression, flexible conditions are expanding union organisational capacity and the universality of capital has led to transnational links between workers. While the global neo-liberal regime weakens traditional paths to unionisation, it has concurrently facilitated alternative strategies of worker organisation and resistance. GATWU members both battle immediate economic issues while transforming worker organisation from an atomised factory workstation, to assembly line, to outside the factory gates, and finally into social movement and transnational spaces. The research takes note of how GATWU's organising strategy both compliments and conflicts with struggles of gender and class, the local and global