SDI 2020 Year in Review

Responding to Covid-19 in our Communities

Over the course of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has touched the lives of nearly every member of the SDI network in one way or another, producing serious humanitarian crises for the millions of slum and informal settlements residents worldwide.

Since March, SDI federations have been developing methods to identify and protect vulnerable groups and limit infections. Urban poor families live in overcrowded informal shacks without access to safe and hygienic water or sanitation services. Staying at home, social distancing and frequent hand washing are very difficult if not impossible and dangerous for most slum dwellers. SDI has supported communities to address the food security and livelihood crises facing their communities, improve access to basic services, make personal protective equipment such as face masks, hand sanitiser, soap, and slum-friendly hand washing stations, produce educational materials and carry out trainings to raise awareness of Covid-19 safety. 

In Uganda, the federation’s Health & Hygiene teams were trained by the Ministry of Health’s Village Health Teams to undertake door-to-door Covid sensitisation in slums across eleven municipalities and were asked to represent slum communities in municipal task forces for Covid-19. In Botswana the federation, in partnership with the Francistown City Council, provided Covid-19 emergency relief in the form of soap and face masks to the most vulnerable and offered training to street vendors and taxi drivers on the prevention of the spread of the virus.

Most slum dwellers work in the informal economy, working as vendors in local markets or as daily wage earners to make ends meet. For these communities, Covid-19 lockdowns mean loss of livelihood - leaving millions without any source of income. In response to this, many SDI federations have linked humanitarian responses to livelihoods. For example, in Ghana and the Philippines the federations have procured hand washing stations from community contractors, supporting slum dweller livelihoods while providing essential health and hygiene support to vulnerable communities. In Zimbabwe, the federation has trained over 100 women in liquid soap and face mask making. Women are now able to produce these goods for their own families and have used these skills to start small but flourishing businesses selling liquid soap, household cleaning supplies, and face masks for a profit.

A number of SDI federations are supporting slum dwellers to implement urban back yard gardening and permaculture projects, promoting food security and bolstering livelihoods. In Namibia, federation members now manage 300 backyard vegetable gardens. In Sierra Leone, the federation is partnering with the Ministry of Agriculture to support the most vulnerable households with planting boxes. And in Zambia, families are being supported to undertake sack gardening at their homes. 

While our federations’ humanitarian responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have offered critical relief to vulnerable communities, SDI’s Know Your City campaign for community-driven slum data collection and pro-poor urban governance has formed the basis of our work to “build back better” from Covid-19. Federations across the SDI network continue to collect data, many in partnership with their local governments, to negotiate and plan for the upgrading required to transform slums into resilient, integrated neighbourhoods for and by the urban poor. 

In Kenya, the federation is undertaking a community-led enumeration of Mukuru in order to generate a beneficiary list for 50,000 housing units being built by government. They are also supporting partner organisations to replicate the groundbreaking Mukuru SPA project, supporting integrated participatory development of Nairobi’s Mathare and Kibera informal settlements. In India, the federation started community-led profiling in nine cities. Communities will use this data to push government to improve access to essential water and sanitation services in their settlements. The South Africa federation, in partnership with other civil society organisations, is using community data to pressure on municipalities to deliver basic water and sanitation services in informal settlements. 

We continue to be spurred on by the resilience and perseverance of SDI’s federations on the ground as they carry out this important work to curb the spread of Covid-19, address the affects of the pandemic measures on our cities' most vulnerable populations, and create innovative solutions to build a more resilient and inclusive urban future. 

Building our youth programme

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. 

The Know Your City TV youth media programme is 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 mobilisation, and incorporate skills training and financial management programmes into our youth strategy.

This year, during the most unusual and challenging of times for SDI, for our federation communities, and for the world, KYC.TV youth media teams have come together — in their communities and online — to document and share the stories of their communities with the world. With in person learning exchanges put on hold due to Covid-19 lockdowns, and in response to a demand from youth for training on social impact media, filmmaking and storytelling for change, KYC.TV hosted a number of well attended online learning exchanges. 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.

Right from the start of the globalisation of the pandemic, KYC.TV teams worked towards combating fake news and educating people about the realities of Covid-19. KYC.TV teams in Zambia and Kenya produced media campaigns to raise awareness of prevention measures such as hand washing and sanitising practices.

This initial work has been followed by months of rich material documenting the affects of lockdown measures of the lives of slum dwellers: loss of income, increased safety threats, and serious food insecurity for many. In Zambia, the KYC.TV team produced material speaking out against gender based violence and raising awareness about the challenges faced by Zambia’s refugee population, some of the country’s most vulnerable communities. The Kenya KYC.TV team was prolific over this time, producing media focused on the disproportionate economic burden experienced by slum dwellers in the face of Covid-19. 

In Nigeria, an innovative approach to the difficulties imposed by social distancing and lockdowns was the emergence of photo-stories as a storytelling tool. In this instance participants took still images on their mobile phones and then recorded field sound interviews on the same phones thereafter combining the audio and image to upload with a geo-tag. The stories are presented through an interactive map on the media team’s Corona Diaries of the Urban Poor. This grassroots storytelling project provides both a micro and personal perspective on the impacts of lockdown and the resultant economic insecurity.

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 laid the foundation for an Integrated Youth Strategy, approved by the SDI Management Committee this year, 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.

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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