Community-led innovations leading to transformative change
Learning from informal settlement dwellers can pave the way to just, democratic, healthier and sustainable cities.
A Know Your City team participates in collaborative data collection (Photo: Know Your City TV/Slum Dwellers International)
The 1.1 billion people living in informal settlements – a number set to nearly treble over the next 30 years (PDF) – are often on the front line of environmental, social, political and economic crises. Increasingly frequent phenomena such as flooding, extreme heatwaves, forced displacements and home loss due to sea level rises or wars, are all challenges that need to be addressed – working with informal settlement dwellers, not against them.
According to World Bank data, 64% of the urban population in low-income countries live in slums. UN-Habitat estimates 85% of slum dwellers (PDF) are concentrated in three regions – Central and Southern Asia (359 million), Eastern and South-Eastern Asia (306 million) and sub-Saharan Africa (230 million).
“Governments and policymakers can no longer afford to ignore the fact that informality is a dominant form of urbanisation.” This is the opening line of a case study collection recently published by GIZ, the German international development agency, in collaboration with Slum Dwellers International (SDI) and IIED, ‘Learning from informality: urban innovations for just and sustainable cities’.
The case studies reveal that existing mobilisation processes in informal settlements – often led by the collective efforts of the residents and their local partners – hold many of the keys to making urban transformations sustainable, healthier, fair and more inclusive.
In the context of a warming climate, it is critical to look at these locally-led processes of transformation to learn the key lessons to address the scale and urgency of current and future challenges.
As UN-Habitat highlighted in its 2023 resolution ‘Accelerating the transformation of informal settlements and slums by 20330 (PDF)’, questions about the design and implementation of such transformations are becoming pressing.
No need to reinvent the wheel – innovations that build on what exists
This GIZ collection proposes that many of the innovations necessary to promote the transformation of cities towards more just, sustainable, democratic and healthier futures, can actually be found in existing experiences in informal settlements.
For many people, the word ‘innovation’ is intrinsically associated with the invention or adoption of new technologies and tools, or the creation of structures and solutions from scratch. This collection, however, maintains that more often than not, innovations involve rearranging, organising, collecting, mobilising, re-imagining and building on what already exists.
Understood this way, urban innovations are about bringing to the forefront and enhancing the existing assets, capacities and resources in informal settlements, steering processes towards more transformative outcomes.
Four strategies for transformation
Including nature-based solutions, community mapping, innovative finance and access to global networks, the collection identifies four main strategies:
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Strengthening local partnerships and local leadership
Adequate governance has always been at the centre of sustainable transformations. The case studies profiled in the collection demonstrate how facilitating collaboration between social actors, local governments and other institutions, has been pivotal in bringing about change. They also illustrate the importance of supporting and equipping a new generation of community leaders – particularly women and young people – with the tools needed to strengthen local democratic systems.
Examples include local government partnerships for nature-based solutions, and a partnership for participatory upgrading in Kenya, an organisation of female leaders as ‘guardians’ for urban climate action in Ecuador, and local partnerships for the self-managed retrofitting of occupied buildings in Brazil.
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Generating and activating community-led local knowledge and prototyping interventions
Here the main emphasis is on supporting and using different mapping and knowledge production forms, including those led by women and youth. Various tools and technologies along with grounded, co-produced knowledge, are used to inform decisions and practices, support advocacy and influence policymaking.
Examples include a collective mobilisation for mangrove restoration in Sierra Leone, community-led climate vulnerability mapping in Liberia, the community-led rehabilitation of a degraded peri-urban forest in Tunisia, and in Senegal, community mapping and mobilisation for informal settlement improvements – at scale.
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Re-imagining local finances and mobilising local resources
Finding ways to access finance and resource is a prerequisite for transforming local realities into more sustainable and healthier environments. This implies collaboration with traditional finance actors (such as banks), as well as creating partnerships and devising mechanisms that allow a more effective mobilisation of local resources – including savings, land, and natural and social resources.
Experiences that showcase this innovation strategy include ‘urban poor funds’ and ‘revolving funds’ in Namibia and Zimbabwe, incremental financing to women homeowners in the Philippines, Colombia and Dominica, and efforts to advance community-led housing in Nepal, Zambia, Malawi and Brazil.
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Building alliances to reframe global debates and agendas
This final set of cases are experiences that, while working at the local level, feature important components related to advocacy, building international networks and strengthening global solidarity. These collective actions are key mechanisms for highlighting and reprioritising agendas at different levels.
Examples include methodologies focused on different aspects: to help the poor access resilient and affordable homes from India; to map the value chain of building materials in informal settlements from Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, and to re-frame informality discourses through global solidarity and networks such as SDI, the Habitat International Coalition and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, among others.
Community-led efforts to protect civic spaces
The international development community faces ever more acute challenges. The collection highlights the remarkable effort of international development agencies in supporting and recognising community-led efforts to address global challenges, such as inequality and the climate crisis.
With the shrinking of civic spaces being considered a global emergency, it is more relevant than ever to highlight those community-led mobilisation efforts that are finding ways to propel change at the local and global level.
According to the observatory CIVICUS, a third of the world’s population now lives in countries with ‘closed’ civic space, the highest percentage since the measurement of civic space conditions began in 2018.
This collection aims to enable more open civic spaces for community-led groups to participate in decision-making, and shape the transformation processes in their cities. It builds a legacy for the year-long series of exchanges convened by GIZ and Cities Alliance in 2024, the ‘Global Peer Learning Series: Urban Innovation for Just and Sustainable Cities’, where many of these experiences were shared and discussed.
Together, these stories signpost ways to address present and future challenges. Learning from these experiences has the potential to change the lives of people in informal settlements by mobilising resources and support to fuel more socially-just, pro-poor, healthier and climate-friendly urban transformations.
Further reading
‘Learning from informality: Urban innovations for just and sustainable cities’ published by GIZ draws on experiences presented during the 2024 Cities Alliance’s ‘Global Peer Learning Series’, as well as the wealth of grounded cases in which SDI, IIED and other partner civil society groups have been involved over the last few years.
The collection was prepared by a team led by Camila Cociña (IIED), Esley Philander (SDI), Mikkel Harder (SDI) and Beth Chitekwe-Biti (SDI). Specific contributions were developed with the support and inputs of SDI affiliates, as well as Christine Wambui, Jacob Omondi, James Taylor (SDI), Richard Bockarie (CODOHSAPA), Evans Banana (Dialogue on Shelter for the Homeless in Zimbabwe Trust), Ariana Karamallis (Build Change), Paula Sevilla-Núñez (IIED), Evaniza Rodrigues (UMM-SP) and George Y Gleh (Federation of Liberia Urban Poor Savers)
The authors appreciate the valuable contributions made by Mikkel Harder and Beth Chitekwe-Biti of SDI to this insight.
