Global campaign for a ‘Roof Over Our Heads’
How defining ‘what women want’ led to international acknowledgement of a basic human need.
Washing blocks set up by community members of an informal settlement (Photo: SuSanA Secretariat, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
The lockdowns and travel restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the traditional methods of information sharing among women members of the informal saving groups of Slum Dwellers International (SDI). But these groups managed to connect virtually, sparking discussions on what the women truly needed to ensure family safety, health, prosperity and long-term survival.
First of five priorities for ‘what women want’
At these meetings, community leaders from SDI and its local affiliates identified five priority areas they called 'What women want'.
These addressed the specific needs of women in informal settlements, not just during the pandemic, but to deal with the increasingly intense climate events of floods, wildfires, hurricane-force winds and extreme heat (especially in cities).
The idea of a global campaign for Roof Over Our Heads (ROOH) emerged from the first of these five demands.
The ROOH campaign was launched at the 27th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP27) at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022. This recognised the importance of climate-resilient housing solutions for people living in informal settlements.
Avoiding the issue?
However, as highlighted in a recent insight in this series, the final first global stocktake text fell short of mentioning ‘cities’, ‘urban’, ‘informal settlements’, ‘shelter’ or ‘housing’ – nor are any of these mentioned in the nine-page Summary of Global Climate Action agreed at COP28.
The SDI women’s leaders noted that everyone else decided what was needed and then ‘told’ women what should be done.
The challenge remains as to how women define, explore, facilitate partnerships and influence communities and cities to believe that change sought by women in informality is not only good for them, but good for the city and the planet.
Catalyst for transformation
The ROOH campaign sought to change how issues get raised by women in informal communities. It seeks to create long-term transformation through community empowerment, incremental upgrading, retrofitting and peer learning. It strives to achieve long-term, practical benefits through collaborating with multiple stakeholders, procuring resources and engaging policymakers.
Women leaders from SDI are at the heart and centre of ROOH. They are the campaign’s ‘accountability compass’. They have played a significant role in the inception of this campaign and they remain its guardians.
This article and the much more detailed report it draws on have been written as much for them and for the communities who work with us, as it has for all others who have supported and worked with the campaign.
The ROOH campaign seeks to facilitate and strengthen existing approaches within governments to make available affordable and accessible building materials with suitable designs and construction techniques. It also seeks the acknowledgement within governments of the need for alternatives in governance and financing that are affordable and accessible for people living in informal settlements.
Together we aspire to produce a bottom-up, demand-driven, solutions-based building process where the local, national, and global circulation of knowledge and ideas will expand everyone’s choices.
The learning labs
But how could this be achieved? Real world examples were needed to explore possible solutions to address the challenges that people in informal settlements experience with climate change.
Seventeen informal settlements in nine cities and towns in India were identified as ‘learning labs’ to act as incubators to test what might be possible, what might work, and importantly, what could be built. The settlements were located in five different climate zones and at different elevations, so available choices and limitations could be fully assessed.
The work also identified coping mechanisms people used when living in high density, informal settlements, often on unhabitable lands along water courses, railway tracks, swamps, marshes, sewerage networks, and near factories – most in poor quality housing, devoid of basic services.
The nine learning cities in India (2022-2023)
The results documented in the ROOH report could not have been achieved without the knowledge and kindness of the residents of the informal settlements documented so far. They welcomed the teams of professionals into their homes, generously gave of their time and provided free access to their dwellings and settlements.
They worked with the ROOH teams to develop questions to capture and document their histories of migration, their links to the homes they live in, and the struggles they continue to face as they cope with extreme weather.
The ROOH team also visited private trusts and societies, developers and officials, to explore the backdrop of how these communities accessed resources, such as materials, finance and contractors to build and repair their homes.
This documentation will help build the foundations of engagement with ROOH partners that will identify another 90 labs. Using the ‘spine’ of the documentation and data collected will produce a powerful aggregation of how vulnerability exists in informal settlements, while allowing them the creative freedom to explore locally specific and unique aspects of how choices for habitat design and construction occur.
Some final thoughts
As more cities from Africa, Latin America and Asia join the campaign, the next article will include a wider range of ‘labs’ and experiences. The work of each lab to date has not only enriched our understanding of the housing challenges, but has also provided valuable insights into sustainable solutions.
Improving the living conditions for the residents of informal settlements, while simultaneously adapting to climate change risks and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, is not only a moral imperative, it is a crucial step towards a just and sustainable future where together we can make a difference.
