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Tapfuma Machakaire  
A visit to Ngozi Mine, a slum settlement that sprouted in bushes around the Bulawayo City Council’s dump site near Cowdray Park, will dampen the spirits of any humane soul.
Ngozi is a Shona word which describes merciless avenging spirits of the dead and for the settlement to attain such a name, summarises the horror that the 350 families living there are going through.

The total population at the settlement is estimated at over 2,000 people who live in shelters made from plastic and wooden poles. For water the shack dwellers rely on shallow wells with contaminated water from dumped chemicals.

Once a week, the Bulawayo City Council supplies them with water transported to the site in bowsers. The residents say they try by all means to preserve the precious clean water for drinking although it hardly lasts a week forcing them at times to consume the contaminated water from the wells.

“We are God’s children, and just like any other human being on earth, we also deserve a decent living and we are grateful to those people who are visiting us and giving us hope that one day we will be able to get stands and build houses in proper residential areas of Bulawayo,” says Gideon Tshuma, chairperson of Ngozi Mine squatter camp.

Tshuma was referring to officials from the Dialogue on Shelter for the Homeless in Zimbabwe Trust, a non-governmental organisation that is providing support to the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation (ZHPF).

The team led by George Masimba Nyama, the programmes officer with dialogue, had gone to Ngozi mine to verify information collected by a profiling team deployed to squatter settlements around Bulawayo as part of the city-wide profiling exercise that the Trust has embarked on in conjunction with the ZHPF.

Since its inception in 1997, ZHPF, also known as Umfelandawonye, has built over 2,000 houses for its members and put infrastructure that includes sewers, water and roads for nearly 11,000 members and non members across the country.

Enumeration processes continue to dominate the activities of the alliance of Dialogue on Shelter and the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation as one of the major tools for organising poor communities. So far, the alliance has conducted over fifty socio-economic surveys and these have assisted to establish housing savings schemes, blocking evictions and facilitating land negotiations which have subsequently resolved security of tenure issues among many other issues.

The enumerations are conducted through what is termed city-wide profiling in which the teams interview slum dwellers and create a data base of their different locations and challenges they face on a day to day basis.

Nyama said the exercise, apart from putting slums on the city’s radar, helps to trigger interventions around immediate challenges faced by the slum communities such as water and sanitation programmes.

“In some instances and at their most successful, the slum profiles have also resulted in conversations with authorities around addressing the structural problems of land tenure and Gunhill informal settlement in Harare is a classic example,” said Nyama.

He said under the Harare slum upgrading project, Bulawayo, Kariba, Chinhoyi, Kadoma and Epworth were identified as partner learning centres.
The alliance is mobilising and sensitising key stakeholders who are instrumental for the city-wide profiles to take place in the selected local authorities. This activity entailed identification of participants and the subsequent carrying out of mobilisation and sensitisation programmes.

Meetings and workshops were used to generate awareness and build consensus around the project. Major stakeholders playing a key role in this project include local authority officials from the respective councils, slum communities, relevant central government departments, tertiary institutions and other community collectives.
Nyama said politicians were critical for galvanising support for pro-poor policies in the management of slums.

“It is envisaged that this activity will produce heightened awareness, political will, agreements and memoranda of understanding as some of the key outputs.”
The alliance will also setup informal urban planning studios in four selected slums. Prior to the studios, field visits will be held for the city planners and planning students to familiarise them with the identified slums.

Masimba said the informal studios would involve community-centered urban planning sessions whose main agenda would be to create space for communities to be part of crafting solutions to addressing challenges associated with urban informality.

“In addition, informal studios are also expected to bridge the gap between theory and practice in planning curriculum through linking planning students with slum realities.”

The alliance also seeks to promote and establish learning platforms through facilitating interactions between the two councils and with other local authorities with similar challenges.

It is against this background that the alliance will undertake exposure visits to promote sharing of ideas and experiences around informal settlements management through such approaches as slum upgrading.

Bulawayo and Kariba, where the alliance has been in operation since 1998, had been selected as case studies under the city-wide profiling exercise. The two areas have a combined federation membership of 6,962 and 70 housing savings schemes. Both areas were impacted negatively by evictions during Operation Murambatsvina in 2005 resulting in massive displacements of slum dwellers and back-yarders.

Examples of slums that were destroyed during the evictions include Nyamhunga holding camp in Kariba and Killarney in Bulawayo.
Nyamhunga had an estimated 700 households before the demolitions. Over the eight-year post-Murambatsvina period the phenomenon of slums has changed resulting in less sprawling informal settlements due to fear of evictions.

The Bulawayo chapter of the federation has grown to include residents in blocks of flats and backyard shack dwellers in low income neighbourhoods that include Makokoba, Mpopoma and Sidojiwe with a total membership of 6,423 members.

Under government’s operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle  the federation members in Bulawayo received 100 stands. Most of the beneficiaries have since completed construction of houses on the allocated stands.

The federation members in Cowdray Park, with the help of the trust, have also built ecological sanitation (ecosan) toilets replacing the pit latrines common in the suburb.

The ecosan toilet system provides a hygienically safe, economical, and closed-loop system to convert human waste into nutrients to be returned to the soil. The new toilet system came at a time pit latrines were collapsing due to the heavy rains received during the just ended rainy season.

Sazini Ndlovu, one of the beneficiaries in the Cowdray Park Garikai scheme, says the ecosan toilets had become popular in his area and even non-federation members had started building them after realising the advantages of the system.

“We are getting inquiries from non-federation members who want to be assisted in construction of the ecosan toilets and we are keen to assist all those interested as the new system will improve the welfare of all the residents of Cowdray Park since we do not have sewer systems in the area,” said Ndlovu.

The key challenges identified in Kariba were those of families residing in one roomed blocks built as temporary accommodation for workers who constructed the Kariba Dam in the 1940s.

In settlements known as Umtali, Fort Jameson and Blantyre in Mahombekombe high density suburb, up to 200 people share ablution facilities that are constantly breaking down due to pressure and lack of attention. The residents are also under threat from the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority’s 330 KV power line which passes overhead.

The Kariba chapter of the federation started in 1998 with a few groups of housing savings schemes being opened in the Nyamhunga holding camp.
In three years, the Kariba chapter had successfully negotiated for a piece of unserviced land from Kariba Municipality. The land which can accommodate 150 households was jointly allocated with two other housing cooperatives from the Zimbabwe National Association of Housing Cooperatives. The federation with a total of 600 members in Kariba received 102 plots with the remaining 48 going to the housing cooperatives.

The federation members felt that although the allocation was far less than its expectations, it offered a unique opportunity for members to collaborate with other groups and created huge opportunity for learning in the process.

Under operation Garikai members were allocated an additional 50 unserviced stands in Nyamhunga where the federation has since managed to put sewer and water infrastructure after receiving training from an infrastructure material supplier.

William Hwata, ZHPF national coordinator based in Kariba, said infrastructure services were implemented using a community centred model whereby essentially all the semi-skilled labour needs were met by the community members.

“Unlike the traditional model where development projects target federation membership, the city-wide slum profiling programme is rallying together the wider community members,” said Hwata.

The members also successfully negotiated with Kariba Municipality to be allowed to build and reside in shacks on the allocated stands in Nyamhunga high density suburb while mobilising resources to build proper houses on their stands.

Maxwell Chipepo, Assistant Director of Housing and Community Services with Kariba Municipality, said the profiling exercise which was also complemented with feedback workshops was helping in coming up with short term solutions to challenges faced by the urban poor.

“As a local authority we are made aware of some of the challenges that we can easily attend to that we had not been aware of all along.” said Chipepo.