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Investing in our youth is investing in our future. In our 2018 - 2022 Strategic Plan, SDI committed to building more powerful and relevant SDI federations through concentrated efforts to engage slum dweller youth, incorporating them into leadership and developing programmes that recognise youth as critical stakeholders in the future of SDI and the future of cities.
In the past Strategic Plan there was a commitment to mobilizing youth. Now federations have systems to track youth membership and deliberately try to attract youth to the movement. The difference in this Strategic Plan is that youth have been given a chance to formulate their own strategy and priority investments.
The Know Your City TV youth media programme has been central to our efforts to expand the reach of youth programming to include livelihoods initiatives, skills training, social entrepreneurship and more. KYC TV emerged towards the end of the past Strategic Plan and will be scaled up given the resounding enthusiasm from the youth for this as a point of engagement with the network. Over the past five years, valuable lessons have been learned about how to deepen and expand SDI's youth programming. These include the need to strengthen and scale up youth programming, re-design new engagements to be more youth-informed, integrate federation rituals into youth work, leverage opportunities for online learning and mobilization, and incorporate skills training and financial management programmes into our youth strategy.
Drawing on these lessons and the principles of the KYCTV programme, such as co-design and co-creation of knowledge, peer-to-peer learning, and learning by doing, SDI has laid the foundation for an Integrated Youth Strategy, recently approved by the SDI Management Committee, that will ensure that all of SDI's work is youth-informed as outlined by our Strategic Plan. The main components of this strategy include the development of a Know Your City "School for Social Impact," with massive open online courses co-created in response to federations' self-identified priorities and needs; global media campaigns for action; a travelling media festival, including photography, film, and performance art to inspire and activate; and the mainstreaming of youth into SDI rituals and structures.
Across the board, the travel limitations caused by Covid-19 have given SDI federations an opportunity to move peer learning to the digital space. While there will always be value in physical, face-to-face learning, the pandemic has offered SDI an additional way to connect people -- an opportunity that youth, who are essentially digital natives, have been able to use effectively and that we will capitalise on as we develop a forward-looking youth strategy.
Our aim is that this integrated youth strategy creates space for youth to develop and benefit from incubators of innovations and ideas in order to empower communities, build local capacity, access enhanced livelihood opportunities and get a seat at the negotiating tables in their cities and on the global stage.
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Communities Doing it for Ourselves:
Working Together to Build a New SDI Constitution
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Over the past month, SDI affiliates have held virtual Regional Hub meetings, bringing together federation and NGO representatives from across the network to deliberate on proposed changes to the SDI Constitution.
These changes were put forward by an ad hoc Constitutional Review Committee, comprised of the Management Committee's Executive Committee, SDI founding members and NGO leadership, with support from SDI professionals with legal expertise and external legal counsel. The proposed changes to the SDI Constitution bring together the network's best practices, lessons learned from gaps in previous governance structures, the needs of a growing network, and a commitment to improve internal accountability within the network and with external partners.
In keeping with this commitment to greater accountability, transparency, and collaborative decision-making, SDI's Management Committee requested that the proposed changes to the SDI Constitution be shared across the network and that feedback from affiliates be provided via the Regional Hub structures.
Last month, over the course of a two week period, each Hub met to deliberate on the proposals and offer formal inputs to the MC and the Constitutional Committee. These inputs will be incorporated into a draft Constitution to be shared with and adopted by the SDI network at the next Council of Federations, a gathering that serves as the Annual General Meeting for SDI-affiliated federations.
The readiness of SDI's leadership and members to review and improve the governing documents of the SDI network confirms the commitment of SDI's federation leadership, professional staff, and governing bodies to this dynamic network and its work.
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Partnering with Local Government to Transform Our Cities:
A letter of thanks from Nairobi City Government
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The Kenya SDI Alliance has worked for years to identify and implement alternatives to evictions for the millions of urban poor households living in Nairobi's slums. These have taken the form of community-driven, in situ slum upgrading projects - ranging from affordable housing to water and sanitation projects and more - implemented as precedent setting pilot projects in order to attract attention from government and other stakeholders with the aim of creating partnerships that would enable this work to be replicated at citywide scale.
In recent years, this has borne fruit in the declaration of the Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) in Nairobi's Mukuru slum belt - an area of the city that is home to roughly 138,000 households. The Mukuru SPA set in motion one of the largest informal settlement upgrading projects ever, aiming to transform a slum area of 650 acres into a healthy, functioning neighbourhood, improving the lives of people who live there.
Mukuru’s challenges are some of the most severe in Nairobi. The SPA goes beyond providing a legal basis for an upgrade. It is an innovative, evolving approach to large-scale collaborative community planning, where Mukuru’s residents, the County government, and around 42 organisations – civil society, academia and private sector – all work together to design an ‘integrated development plan’ for the area, its residents, and its businesses and institutions.
The below letter of appreciation from the Nairobi Metropolitan Services, the government agency in charge of planning for Nairobi City County, recognises the dedication and invaluable contribution of the Kenya SDI Alliance and the SDI network towards the development and rolling out of the Mukuru SPA plan, requesting continued support over the coming two years towards the project's completion. Partnerships such as these that recognise the critical contribution of organised communities of the urban poor are at the very heart of SDI's strategy to transform the slums of our cities and create resilient, slum-friendly cities for all.
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Building Urban Resilience in Zimbabwe
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Dialogue on Shelter, the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation (ZHPF) and the Zimbabwe Young People’s Federation ZYPF) are part of a consortium of non-governmental organisations implementing the Urban Social Assistance Programme in three Zimbabwean cities: Harare South, Epworth and Bulawayo. The Urban Social Assistance Programme has two complementary focus areas: a cash transfer component and an urban resilience component. Since November 2019, the Zimbabwe SDI alliance has been implementing preliminary activities in order to roll out the urban resilience work with collectives in the targeted domains. Preliminary activities have centered on mobilizing and organising grassroots savings collectives which will spearhead vital community-led urban resilience interventions that are needed alongside cash transfers to improve food security.
Click here to read more about this innovative programme.
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