Women and poverty in the slums.

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By Hellen Nyamweru:Women and girls in the slums are particularly affected by the harsh conditions the slum presents.Inadequate services ranging from housing with little accessibility to  water,health,sanitation,schools and other essential basic services.Women for instance have different physical needs than men and have a greater  private need of toilet and bathing services.Inadequate bathing and toilet facilities as well as in effective policing in the slums exposes women to rape and other forms of violence .Violence in the slums is endemic and goes widely unpunished because of fear of reprisals and attacks from perpetrators.This among other factors contributes to making and keeping the slum women poor.

Most women lives in the slums are characterized by the daily struggle to feed their families.Majority of these women are single mothers who have been left/abandoned by their husbands with several children to take care of.Their husbands fail to pay alimony and the burden of children is left to the women which impairs their ability to get any gainful employment and thus contributes to keeping them poor.In addittion,most women in the slums do not own the structures they live in,they lease them and pay rent which also takes away the little savings they might have made.Inadequate sanitary facilities enhances the high incidence of disease and infections among women in the slums.This has a big impact on their health and they have to spend on the little they have on treating themselves.

In line with the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG's) ,Uganda is committed to reducing by half-between 1990-2015,the proportion of people without sustainable access to sanitation.The Government has ambitious plans to ensure that 90% of households will have  access to a hygienic,affordable and sustainable toilet by 2015.However existing Government policies fail to address government failure to enforce laws obliging landlords and structure owners to construct sanitary facilities for tenants in the slums and this continues to affect the lives of many in the slums negatively.The federation of slum dwellers in Uganda is committed to bringing some of these gaps to light.

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Through the enumeration exercises that have been carried out in many regions of Uganda,slum dwellers intend to use the findings to negotiate and lobby for many of the basic services lacking in the slums.The findings will open doors that have been closed in the past,they will give a voice to many who had been voiceless and recognize the slum dwellers as an integral part of the city entitled to all other services provided by the government to all citizens of Uganda.The time to do this is now,the wait is over!!

Rich landlords in the slums!!!

By Hellen Nyamweru: As the old adage goes."the poor will always be the walking sticks of the rich".A true revelation of this is being witnessed by the numbering and enumeration teams in Mbale slums during the on going enumeration and mapping activities.In Nkoma ward where there are very large expanse of slums,enumerators in the numbering teams discovered the painful truth of absent landlords who own very many stuctures lacking even the basic services i.e toilets and wash areas.In Uganda government regulations on housing are an abused subject,nobody takes note of this,not even the tenants who live in these dilapidated structures they call homes because they have no choice,places not suitable for human habitation.The local authorities and public health officials have a duty to ensure that landlords comply with standards on building and sanitation as stipulated by the Ugandan laws.These laws such as the public health act and local authority building codes are however are not observed in slum and settlements to the detriment of slum dwellers.This is worsened by the fact that private investors are not willing to invest in such areas.The poor in the slums are left to  fend for themselves,to negotiate how to live in very inhuman conditions!!.Ignorance is yet another characteristic of people living in the slums,they are not aware of their rights and therefore do not fight when things are not in order for instance on building regulations

In Nkoma,a large slum in Mbale city,a certain landlord owns more than 27 structures which do not really look like places human beings should be living.These houses lack toilets and bathrooms,structures they may wish to call toilets/bathrooms are made of tree branches,sacks and old plastics with open tops.I tried to enquire  on how often the landlord seeks to improve the status of the tenants especially concerning toilets and bathrooms but this is what I learnt from a tenant who has been here for seven years,"he comes to pick/demand  his money every end of month or sends some of his sons to do so,he has never tried to improve on the sanitation in this place, in fact if you do not have the rent,he sends you off but not after getting his rent either in cash or kind".

The deprivation of these services especially toilets and bathrooms hits women really hard because they require more privacy than men such as washrooms.It is the responsibility of landlords to ensure that tenants in the slums have access to toilets and wash areas as well as emptying pit latrines so that they do not overflow and become a health risk.This is however neglected in this area where landlords appear to be interested in renting as many structures as possible instead of taking care of sanitary needs of their tenants.

The toilet cum bathroom in the area in question,Nkoma ward, Nambozo cell was in very bad condition,almost full and yet the landlord who happens to be an absent landlord is most likely to do nothing about this.This calls for more sensitization on slum dwellers to realize that they have rights guarding against such inhuman conditions in these slums and it is hoped that the results of this enumeration exercise will help to inform many on this issues.