2. A desperate situation

Three hundred people to one pit latrine with no pipes to dispose of urine and feces. Nightly raids by vandals and thugs that roam freely in the absence of police. One out of every two people lacking any steady source of monthly income, however small. Such are the daily realities of Kibera.

Property

Due to its complex history and tangled web of title claims on the land, Kibera is the epitome of what is often referred to as lack of secure tenure. Nubians, absentee landlords, structure owners, and tenants from an array of tribal backgrounds all lay claim to some portion of the underlying property and buildings of Kibera, though, in theory, the government owns all of it. For the average tenant, however, the legal confusion regarding land titles does not matter; the issue for them is the fact that they lack any stable claim to the room they are renting.

Practically, this means that tenants – who pay rent to landlords that can effectively treat them however they want (and not pay taxes on their rental income) – can be evicted without warning or reason at any point in time, and without any legal recourse. In the past, it has been documented that both the government and landlords have conducted large-scale evictions without warning.

Food and water

Like the rest of Kenya, Kiberans are subject to highly volatile food price swings; for instance, maize, the primary component of Kenyan diets, doubled in price between 2008 and 2009 due to famine and political unrest. Oxfam, Concern Worldwide, and CARE declared Kibera to be in a state of prolonged food crisis in June, 2009.

Tenants that live in Kibera do not have access to water directly. However, outside Kibera, over 90% of people have access to water provided by utilities to their homes.

The water situation, however, is much more challenging in Kibera itself. Water mains cross underneath Kibera to carry water to surrounding golf courses and estates, but the utility companies do not provide access to tenants directly. Instead, Kiberans must either purchase water by the liter from water brokers, at prices that are 5x to 100x the price paid for metered water in the city, or walk to locations outside Kibera with cheaper water and walk it back to their living quarters.

By contrast, over 90% of the remainder of Nairobi has access to water provided by the utility companies to their residences.

Sanitation

Just as there is no water being piped in, there is no waste being pumped out of Kibera. The settlement, being built on unstable, hilly terrain that straddles a major railroad – terrain that is part dirt and part trash heap – completely lacks waste management or sanitation infrastructure. As a result, Kiberans resort to paying for each use of a shared latrine (as many as 500-1,000 people per toilet) or employing the Flying Toilet. As it is used in Kibera, the Flying Toilet involves a person defecating in a plastic bag and tossing it through the air during the night.

Most sewage runs downhill in open trenches, resulting in stagnation and pooling problems that breed insects and odor.

Health and disease

The combination of malnutrition, poor water, and utter lack of sanitation leads to widespread disease rates in Kibera, with cholera, typhoid, and dysentery being the predominant maladies, followed by diarrhea, worms, and other gastrointestinal issues.

The most well-publicized issue is, however, the prevalence of HIV / AIDS. Approximately 15% of adults living in Kibera carry the virus; the latent effect of the epidemic is the presence of over 50,000 children who were orphaned due to AIDS.

Intro  |   Life in Kibera  |   History  |   Politics & aid