Participatory enumerations at the national level in Namibia: the Community Land Information Programme (CLIP)

I. Introduction

The Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) is a network of almost 700 urban and rural savings groups involving about 20,000 households in all the regions of the country.⁽¹⁾ Before they adopted the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) methodology and became a federation, the SDFN was known as the Saamstaan (“Standing Together”) Housing Association. Saamstaan was founded in 1987 in a township of Windhoek known as Katutura, as a cooperative to work on housing issues. It was the first housing cooperative in Namibia as, until 1987, black Namibians had been denied the right to own immovable property, including housing; so when the law changed, there was significant interest in beginning to address these issues. The cooperative was organized through the initiative of various concerned community leaders linked to local Catholic churches, as part of their activities for the International Year of Shelter. The initial Saamstaan groups included mostly domestic workers who were living in overcrowded rented rooms or in informal shacks in the backyards of formal homes and otherwise invisible interstitial urban green spaces. In addition to working on housing issues, the Catholic Church contacts introduced the concept of savings to Saamstaan in the form of informal credit unions. The purpose of these credit unions was to facilitate savings towards specific housing projects that Saamstaan and other community groups were undertaking. To increase the scope and strength of their work, in November 1992 an umbrella organization with a support service was founded by the association to support the members in their mission to address the shelter problems of the very poor; it was called the Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG). During the first six years of NHAG’s existence, the number of community groups increased from four to 34, involving a total of about 1,000 households. Their activities included savings through their informal credit unions, obtaining land, making bricks and building houses.

In 1988, Saamstaan conducted an enumeration in Katutura, with the idea of drawing attention to the issues faced by “backyarders”, those living in informal shacks in the backyards of formal structures. Unfortunately, the subsequent enumerations among the housing groups were not as successful as had been hoped: while they did succeed in illustrating the situation of “shack dwellers”, only members of the groups were surveyed, so they were only able to present a partial picture of the housing issues faced in the settlement generally. In terms of Saamstaan’s housing projects, this made it a relatively weak and expensive negotiating tool. Over time, the groups found that their fight for housing was stalling and that a more robust and inclusive approach was needed, notably a set of tools that would expand the scope beyond their members to include the community at large. In 1998, the housing groups under NHAG’s umbrella adopted the methodologies⁽²⁾ developed by the federations that were members of SDI, to become the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN). They reformed their savings groups around the SDI model of daily savings (as opposed to the previous project specific savings), settlement level enumerations and peer exchanges to expand and strengthen their work as well as the community’s ownership of the process. The support service of the umbrella organization became a trust in 1999 and kept their name, the Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG). After exchanges with federations in South Africa and Zimbabwe, to witness the workings of mature daily savings groups and participatory enumerations, the SDFN completed their own settlement level enumerations of four settlements in Windhoek in 1999 and 2000. These enumerations, particularly the survey of Okahandja Park in Windhoek in 2000, proved to be transformational events for the SDFN. During the announcement of the results of the enumeration (in 2000), the SDFN was able to secure a funding pledge from the national government stating that each year it would match the funds saved by the SDFN through daily savings and that, in addition, each year it would provide a grant of one million Namibian dollars to the SDFN. There were no stipulations on the ways in which these donations were to be used, and the SDFN decided to use them towards housing through investment in their own revolving fund, the Twahangana Fund.

The pledge was a direct result of the impression that the announcement of the enumeration results had made on the national Minister of Housing. He toured the housing model⁽³⁾ that the SDFN had developed and was shown the work that they had been doing as a federation: the enumeration data, the savings, the membership and the amount that had been saved by the members. The national Housing Minister took this work and the enumeration data very seriously. As he said at the time, this was something he had never seen before, communities that could do things for themselves, that he could work with. It was then that he stated that the SDFN could make appointments to see him, that he would be available anytime. He made the commitment to provide grants and matching funds, and to date the SDFN has received N$ 11 million from the national government, as last year the grant increased to N$ 3 million.

The SDFN quickly demonstrated their organizational capacity to scale up these processes and to expand.⁽⁴⁾ During the early 2000s, the national government began work to regularize the informal settlements; in 2004, a national level task force was set up to determine land ownership and to survey available land in the country that could be used for slum resettlement. The SDFN was also struggling to determine land ownership; housing was a major issue but nobody knew who owned what land or what land was available for resettlement. Furthermore, there was little data on informal settlements, including the number of people living in these areas and the level of services provided. In Namibia, the title for undeveloped land automatically goes to the relevant local authority. Legally, the local authority cannot sell land zoned for residential purposes unless that land has already been surveyed, parcelled and provided with full infrastructure. This means that the government must sell residential land at a relatively high price in order to re-coup their investment, making it unaffordable for low-income development. Furthermore, Namibia is still working to reconcile varied forms of communal land tenure in the rural areas of the country, leaving a large majority of the rural poor in a state of insecurity over their exact rights. About a quarter of a million Namibians are considered completely landless.⁽⁵⁾ This helps explain why land is such an important issue; not only have informal settlements proliferated as Namibia rapidly urbanized in the past decade, but a large percentage of the population remains without secure land tenure. As of 2010, about 38 per cent of the population lived in urban areas⁽⁶⁾ and about 30 per cent of those living in cities were living in informal settlements.⁽⁷⁾ About half of Namibia’s population currently are still subsistence farmers on communal land in rural areas with insecure rights to the land.⁽⁸⁾

Despite the efforts of the national government and national level task force, after several years of work the tenure questions remained unresolved, while the number of informal settlements continued to rise. The national government was hampered by the lack of specific information on informal settlements, particularly on housing and infrastructure needs. In 2006, during several rounds of engagement between the SDFN, NHAG, SDI and the then-Minister of Regional and Local Government, Housing and Rural Development, John Pandeni, the Community Land Information Programme (CLIP) was conceived. In discussions with the minister, the SDFN found that they were in agreement over the importance of addressing land tenure in moving forward to improving housing and infrastructure in informal settlements. The SDFN felt that they could be building more houses, but the land was not available and even the minister lacked accurate figures for the number of people in need of housing. CLIP was designed to address the gap in data concerning land ownership and informal settlements. Under this programme, the SDFN would profile and then enumerate each informal settlement in Namibia, covering all of the people currently without secure land tenure, gathering information about the population, demographics, health, infrastructure, development priorities of each community and also mapping each area. Namibia is a relatively small country and the total number of informal settlements is in the low hundreds, placing this task within the capacity of the SDFN, which at that point had daily savings groups in each of the 13 regions of Namibia, 587 groups in total, with about 18,000 members.

II. Settlement Profiles and the First Phase of Clip

The first phase of CLIP began in 2007, with the creation of a settlement profile⁽⁹⁾ for each of the 235 informal settlements in Namibia. The first settlement profiled was Rundu in January 2007 and by October 2008, the profiling was complete. For this phase of the survey, in each informal settlement the SDFN held group discussions to ascertain the general situation in the community. When the profiling was completed in 2008, the results were given to the communities, local and national government, and were also published online. Based on the priorities of the communities and the abilities of the local government authorities, a second phase of enumerations was planned, which would be completed at the household level and be more project specific.

In Phase 1, 235 settlements were profiled, representing just over 500,000 people without secure land tenure. Given that the total population of Namibia is about 2,100,000 people, this represents a significant percentage (about 24 per cent). For the government, these settlement profiles provided specific information on these areas for the first time, rather than just estimations. For this reason, the profiles were an important information base from which projects and policies could be determined. Municipalities were encouraged to begin development projects as they now had specific information on which to base planning. The settlement profiles also improved local government accountability, as they gave national government a tool with which to evaluate the local authority and regional council development proposals and a baseline against which to measure the results of their work.

III. Phase 2 and the Swakopmund Survey

Drawing on the priorities articulated by the communities in the first phase and on the abilities of the local government authorities, a second phase of enumerations began, which was more project specific. This second phase included a household level socioeconomic survey, mapping and shack numbering with the specific purpose of providing the foundation for an upgrading or redevelopment project. The second phase built on the information gathered during the first phase, but it was more detailed and focused on generating development priorities for each settlement. During the second phase of CLIP, the technological aspects of enumerations became more important, as the SDFN was attempting to undertake community enumerations at a scale that they had never before attempted.

A special process of conducting enumerations was developed by the SDFN for CLIP, to adapt these community-led processes to the scale that was necessary in order to enumerate all the informal settlements in the country. A national team trained local community members to undertake the survey, and the results were immediately manually tabulated, presented back to the community, discussed and corrected for accuracy. In addition to being used by the community, the enumeration data were also entered into a computer database by NHAG in a parallel process and submitted to the national and local government authorities.

The manual tabulation of data, using pens and markers on large sheets of paper, is an important facet of the community ownership of the process. For a while, the SDFN experimented with having community members enter the data into a computer database instead of manually tabulating it. They found that this process was slow, the computers often seized up as a result of viruses and other problems and it hampered the engagement of the community at large with the data. With manual tabulation, the community can immediately combine the data on a sheet of paper, analyze it and present the findings then and there. The community can start discussing the information at once, before the local authority has even seen the data or had a chance to say anything about it in terms of interpreting what it should or might mean. During this process of manual tabulation, each individual confirms whether their information has been captured correctly and signs off on it. This is an important step because it provides an opportunity to correct the data regarding particularly sensitive issues, for example household income. Often a household won’t want to declare their true income, but through the process of manual tabulation, as the community starts to analyze the data, certain questions arise such as: “You said your income was N$ 300 a month but that you can pay N$ 250 a month for housing? How will you live on the N$ 50 left over?” Often, the respondent will revise their answers or provide additional information about extra income or support they receive. For the SDFN, this has been an important lesson – to keep the manual tabulation process even as NHAG enter the data into a computer database; it provides a crucial space for discussing and correcting data as well as cementing the community ownership over the data and process.

For each community, this profiling exercise presented a unique opportunity to come together and assess their priorities as a group. Communities now have the opportunity to discuss their priorities as a group. Individuals might have had an idea of their own personal priorities, but this was an opportunity to get a sense of the needs of their neighbours and of the best sequence for meeting those needs. For example, perhaps when a group first started looking at the enumeration data, 10 per cent would say that land tenure should be the first priority and 20–30 per cent felt that housing or clean toilets should be addressed first. This initiated a discussion about the relative importance of these issues and the most strategic order for them to be addressed. Those who said, “I want to build a house” were asked: “Well, what land will you build a house on?” since they didn’t own the land. This process of critical engagement helped communities to get a clearer picture of what their alternatives were and led some to change their minds about what issue they felt should be addressed first in their settlement. It also empowered the community to engage with government: now that they were able to articulate their needs, they could communicate them to government and petition for them publicly. As the community presented the results of their settlement profile to the city and the municipality, it was a statement not just of ownership over the data but also that they now needed to be more involved in the planning and development of the city.

IV. Conclusions

For the SDFN, the Community Land Information Programme (CLIP) has been a formative process, strengthening both the inner workings of the SDFN and their external relationships, as well as their legitimacy on the national stage in Namibia. CLIP has served as a springboard to expand daily savings groups and the level at which they are able to address issues of housing and infrastructure. Older processes such as participatory enumerations have been further developed and expanded, for example with the creation of a national training team to bring household level enumerations into communities where they aren’t already established. The SDFN have expanded and strengthened their relationships with municipal, regional and national levels of government. They have also succeeded in creating the first detailed information resource on informal settlements in Namibia, an invaluable tool for government and community groups alike.

Some of these outcomes could, perhaps, have been anticipated at the outset of CLIP. Others have come as more of a surprise. For example, one of the notable lessons from CLIP was the importance of manual data entry, combined with community participation in the later data analysis and documentation processes. By experimenting with computer data entry, the SDFN found that it was a bit exclusionary; manual tabulation is a group activity, whereas computer data entry is more of an individual activity and limits participation to those members of the community who are computer literate. This experience changed the ways in which the federation as a whole conducts enumerations in that it reinforced and clarified the value of their old process. At the same time, the value of technology was also realized and its usefulness accepted. The parallel process of having NHAG enter the enumeration data into the computer helped address the issue of how to balance the use of technology with the importance of external accessibility and the ability to share the data with various levels of government.

As the second phase of CLIP continues, it is also important to reflect on what CLIP represents in terms of demonstrating the ability of membership-based organizations of the poor to work at the national scale in the South. Using the SDI core processes of daily savings, participatory enumerations and exchanges, the SDFN have matured and strengthened to such a point as to be able to act on the national stage and reach out beyond settlements in which they already have active savings groups. While settlement profiles and enumerations can’t replace the mobilizing and organizing power of daily savings, they are still crucial tools for starting reflection and discussion within informal settlements about what development issues need to be addressed and how. A basis for engagement between communities and the government is established through the collection and discussion of enumeration data, opening space for partnership that might not have been possible previously.

At the most fundamental level, as the SDFN begins to take the data gathered during Phase 2 of CLIP forward and continues to mature its basic processes of daily savings groups, enumerations, exchanges and building houses and infrastructure, what it hopes to demonstrate and reinforce is the primary role of the urban poor in driving and shaping development in their communities. Despite the national scale at which CLIP operates, it has been a strong reminder that the community should drive the process. In each settlement, the value of the settlement profile came as much from the community discussions around development priorities and the empowerment of the community to engage with government on development as from the creation of a valuable data set. Without community ownership of the process and the initial interest on the part of the community in participating in CLIP and then their continued participation in the collection and analysis of data, this critical reflection, discussion of priorities and community empowerment would have been impossible. Since it was the community members in each settlement who analyzed the data, they were able to present it to the local government authority themselves and insert themselves into the process of planning a development project. For the SDFN, Phase 2 of CLIP has been an exciting time, as it has provided a greater opportunity for communities to drive the process and deeply engage with the issues of development in their settlement. While the aggregate value of these settlement profiles and enumeration data is significant, more important perhaps are the local processes that CLIP has set in motion, and the ways in which it translates into action and change in informal settlements around Namibia.