Mapping kicks off..........

By Hellen Nyamweru:Last week saw the commencement of slum mapping in two cities of Uganda i.e. Mbale and Jinja aimed at collecting spatial data for effective and inclusive planning of the cities.Mapping is aimed at promoting land management and tenure tools for poverty alleviation.Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping,the activity is aimed at producing reliable numbers about slum populations to further help in the effective planning of our cities and avoid problems of urban decay.This comes after slum enumerations in which social data from slum areas was collected.The social data done collected present information on village layout,population size,land and structure ownership patterns,infrastructure,ethnolinguistic groups,health patterns and others.

The slums we have today are in bad shape ,simple shacks made of flimsy structures of cardboard,mud and even polythene bags.Unable to find proper housing,slum dwellers build their structures on empty government land or private land which makes them vulnerable to multiple evictions.Overcrowding and congestion with rubbish littering all over makes slums ineligible for basic services most especially because city authorities fail to recognize them.They are excluded from the wider city budgets in many cases.

Mapping will therefore formally recognize  slum dwellers and slums in general because their structures  will  physically be seen on the maps in their respective cities.This will in turn give them a voice to lobby and negotiate for the basic services that lack in the slums yet availed to their neighbours dwelling in the well planned areas of the cities.
In most cases,monitoring issues in the slums is a vexed subject and therefore slum dwellers are left  to face many of the problems affecting them alone.It is their collective effort that will help them pull out of the dire straits The mapping exercise has been  well received by the slum dwellers in both cities,Jinja and Mbale and the exercise is expected to spread to the rest of the cities i.e Kabale,Arua and Mbarara.
A one-week break has since been taken by both the  mapping teams within the federation and the community support officers from ACTogether  to evaluate the situation in the field,come up with area boundaries of more slums and get ready for more work in the cities.We've established a good start and we pray for a good ending too!!