Principal Investigator
This project will kickstart tracking and re-surveying a large sample of Nairobi slum residents surveyed more than a decade ago in 2012. Back then, I jointly led a research team that conducted a complete mapping exercise of Nairobi’s largest informal settlement, Kibera. We collected coarse data on housing conditions from more than 32,000 resident households, detailed demographic and socioeconomic data from a random sample of 1,123 households, and high-resolution satellite imagery, allowing us to evaluate housing quality across the settlement. This earlier work led to two widely cited publications in which we identified the lack of longitudinal research on slum residents as a key research gap in this literature.
Until now, this data gap has made it very difficult to understand the mobility patterns of slum dwellers in developing regions generally and to answer key questions in the academic literature on slums. In particular, there is a dearth of evidence on migration in and out of slum areas. We lack a good understanding of whether households face constraints in moving out of informal settlements and the nature of these constraints: housing supply shortages, credit and liquidity constraints, lack of access to insurance, labor market discrimination, etc. What is especially missing in this literature are attempts to track slum dwellers over time and to understand how often these households attempt to and succeed in relocating to different, formal neighborhoods. Our earlier fieldwork found that the median household had resided in the Kibera slum for ten years. This figure suggested that many households may not transition out of slum living conditions as rapidly as previously thought. As a potential explanation for this finding, we hypothesized that slum livelihoods (which combine unemployment, poor health outcomes, and a lack of access to amenities, credit, and insurance) might create living conditions akin to a poverty trap for some of their residents. This hypothesis has important policy implications for urban planning but has remained largely untested, with a few exceptions.
The project will evaluate the feasibility of tracking the microsample of 1,123 households surveyed in 2012 to understand: 1) how many of these households still reside in the Kibera slum; 2) what explains the location choice of these “stayers”; 3) how many have (forcingly or willingly) moved out of the slum; and 4) what has been the location of destination of these movers.
This project will provide entirely novel evidence on the mobility of slum residents, which is itself key to understanding how slum dwellers can be better integrated into the growing cities of the developing world. Do slums help absorb the inflows of rural migrants and facilitate their transition toward formal housing and employment in the city? Or do slum living conditions create structural barriers preventing rural migrants from successfully transitioning?