Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
IN HUMAN SETTLEMENTS IN DEVELOPING CITIES
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ESF/N-AERUS International Workshop Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
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Sameh Wahba
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In this paper, I compare the impact of two policy approaches that aim to address the shelter needs of marginalized residents living in fringe settlements and contribute to alleviating their poverty. The first is a minimalist land distribution strategy where squatters are granted land parcels in the new sites to which they are being relocated. The underlying assumption is that, once provided with secure property titles, the poor would incrementally build their houses using their own resources and gradually work their way out of poverty. The second approach, which I call Integrated Community Development (ICD), provides a comprehensive assistance package that includes shelter construction finance, infrastructure improvements, and revenue-enhancing schemes. The basic premise of ICD is that secure landownership is not enough per se to alleviate poverty in remote marginalized settlements.
My research is based on the fieldwork that I conducted in Dar-El-Beida, a marginalized settlement on the periphery of Nouakchott, Mauritania's capital, where a pilot ICD project -known as Twizé-was implemented in 1999 through the collaboration of the Mauritanian Commissariat aux Droits de l'Homme, à la Lutte Contre la Pauvreté et à l'Insertion and the French NGO GRET. Prior to that, land parcels in Dar-El-Beida had been distributed by the authorities to relocate squatters from the Moroccan Mosque Kébbé after a fire burnt their settlement in 1995. A key component of the research is a questionnaire administered to three randomly selected samples of Dar-El-Beida residents consisting of Twizé program participants, landowners that have not participated in the Twizé program, and squatter families.
This research contributes to the important debate surrounding the impact of secure land tenure on shelter improvement and poverty alleviation. My fieldwork results contest the assumption that land tenure is all what it takes to induce a large number of limited-income families to incrementally consolidate their housing.
In Dar-El-Beida, in the 4 years between relocation and the Twizé program's launch, only 7% of all surveyed landowners had self-financed housing consolidation while a 35% property turnover rate was recorded during the same period. If anything, these findings point to the gap that often occurs between the largely valid premise that secure land tenure is an important precondition to improve the poor's living conditions and the outcome resulting from inappropriate project design and implementation measures. In reality, the poor are often times given property titles to parcels located in remote, inaccessible settlements such as Dar El Beida. The scarcity of infrastructure services that characterizes such settlements until they are sufficiently populated hinders the process of shelter consolidation and discourages many beneficiaries from occupying their parcels. Finally, those who have no choice but to settle in such settlements are frequently too poor to consolidate their houses in the absence of adapted housing finance instruments and/or measures to increase their earnings and enable them to afford shelter improvements.
Twizé's housing construction finance catalyzed significant investments in shelter improvement. Using regression analysis to control for variables affecting housing consolidation, the average family receiving Twizé housing finance spent of its own resources 380% more on shelter improvement than a squatter family with identical characteristics and 129% more than an identical landowning family that has not participated in the program. The latter in turn invested 110% more than an identical squatter family. Interestingly, the signal sent by the Twizé program concerning public officials "recognition" of Dar-El-Beida (a hitherto marginalized settlement) induced some non-participating property owners to self-improve their housing.
In conclusion, the Twizé ICD program seems to have succeeded in transforming Dar-El-Beida into a viable neighborhood by reconciling the seemingly conflicting objectives of minimizing resident turnover and enhancing property values in a way that addresses the shortcomings of the previous land distribution strategy. The focus on poverty alleviation however has constrained the efficiency of shelter delivery and increased its unit cost because of the reliance on subsidies and extensive 'soft cost' components. These factors strongly hinder the program's capacity for cost-effective replication.
N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net