Slums

Slums are residential areas filled with overcrowded, poor, or informal houses with inadequate access to safe water and sanitation and insecurity of tenure. Slum housing may be built with either simple shacks or permanent structures. However, they usually lack enough light, ventilation, and heating and they are susceptible to fire, flooding, and other natural disasters. A slum can also be called a shantytown, skid row, favela, barrio, bustee, Kampung, katchi, abadi, or ghetto, in different countries, depending on the location, ethnicity, and type of the structures of the settlement. Poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment are usually high among slum dwellers, as are hunger and child malnutrition. For example, child malnutrition in Ethiopia in 2010 was around 49 percent. In Côte d'lvoire and in Brazil, malnutrition in urban slum children is three to four times higher than in children from nonslum areas. In addition, the lack of basic civil services, such as clean water and sanitation results in high levels of crime, drug and alcohol abuse, related health [Page 823]and mental illness, and high rates of suicides and homicides. There are usually no medical facilities in slums. Local and international charitable organizations and churches provide some medical services. For example, in Shanghai, approximately three million workers do not have access to medical and social welfare or any other benefits.

According to the report “State of the World's cities 2010/2011” by United Nations (UN) HABITAT, the number of slum dwellers has increased from 777 million in 2000 to 828 million in 2010. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest slum population. with 199.5 million people, followed by 190.7 million in southern Asia, 189.6 million in eastern Asia, 110.7 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 88.9 million in southeastern Asia, 35 million in western Asia, 11.8 million in north Africa, and 6 million in Oceania. A UN Millennium Development Goal was to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020 in order to curb the estimated projection of 3 billion slum dwellers by 2050. More than double the goal has already been met as of 2010: 227 million people were lifted out of living in slum conditions. However, the slum population is growing at a rate of approximately 6 million each year, which will result in almost 1 billion slum dwellers by the year 2020.

The metal and mud homes that make up this slum in Kibera, Kenya, house over 1 million people. Slums are usually built around undesirable areas like landfills, in which Kibera slum dwellers find discarded bones from cows and goats to recycle into jewelry.

Some of the largest slums are in Dharavi (India), Kibera (Nairobi), City of God (Rio de Janeiro), and Orangi Township (Pakistan). Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia, expands over a total of 535 acres and accommodates more than 600,000 people. It houses many small industries with a considerable earning power on a prime location near the middle of the city, not far from the airport, about a mile from the city's new Bandra-Kurla business district. Kibera, the second-largest slum in Africa, is located about four miles from the central business district of Nairobi with a population of more than 800,000 spread over just 630 acres. Approximately 120,000 people live in the rough neighborhood of the slum called the City of God outside the wealthy neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro. Over 1 million people live and work in the booming cottage industries located in the slums of Orangi Township in Karachi.

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