Housing and Homelessness in Developing Nations

Comparing Homelessness in Developed and Developing Countries

In developed countries, homelessness is generally more attributable to personal or household circumstances than to a failure of the housing supply system. Even when affordable housing exists, homeless people in the West frequently need a range of social support and welfare systems to help them gain access to it, and to the services that might lift them out of homelessness. In developing countries, however, formal housing supply systems simply fail to provide enough shelter to fill the demand, particularly among low-income groups. This leads to massive informal development and squatting which, in turn, places hundreds of millions of people in living conditions that would merit the term homelessness in developed nations.

Indeed, most of the world's population would be homeless if judged by the standards of the developed nations. For example, in its 1999 study of the issue in Europe, the European Federation of National Organizations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA) defined four levels of homelessness based on housing adequacy. It described an adequate home as one that is secure and where available space and amenities provide a good environment for the satisfaction of physical, social, psychological, and cultural needs. Low quality, by these European standards, is manifested by overcrowding, high levels of noise, and pollution or infestation—conditions that many, if not most, people in developing countries endure.

Cooper (1995) also offers four categories, or degrees, of homelessness. At one end of this scale are those who are housed but without security, safety, and adequate standards for health or child development; at the other end are people without a roof, living on the streets. In Cooper's model, the category of people without an acceptable roof over their heads could describe the countless millions in poor-quality squatter settlements around the world, as well as street dwellers.

Defining Homelessness in Developing Countries

Official definitions of homelessness range from nonexistent, as in Peru, China, and Ghana, to so broad as to be virtually all-encompassing, as in Zimbabwe. However, for census purposes, most nations have working definitions that fall into four broad categories.

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