Revisiting … Retrieving the Baby from the Bathwater: Slum Upgrading in Sub-Saharan Africa

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The impetus This research project started at the World Bank in 2000. Urban practitioners working on the Africa region were concerned that almost all African cities were struggling with the slum problemoslums were everywhere and growing rapidly. It was clear that something needed to be done, but the `what' was far from obvious. A key issue was that the Bank's own experience with investing in slums had not been resoundingly successful. The Bank pioneered slum upgrading programs in the 1970s and had invested heavily in them for the next two decades. By the early 1990s, however, the verdict was that these upgrading programs were not working and, consequently, the Bank's financing for them had dwindled significantly. Additionally, there were few recent, large-scale, and representative studies of slums, especially in Africa. There were, hence, few reliable data on the numbers of people residing in these slums, the level of services they had, and their quality of life and living conditions. The research team decided on a two-pronged approachoa retrospective that culled insights from prior project experience as well as existing literature, and an empirical update based on carefully sampled surveys of slum residents in a few African cities. ` Retrieving the baby from the bathwater: slum upgrading in Sub-Saharian Africa'' (Gulyani and Bassett, 2007) is a part of the retrospective analysis.We ploughed through volumes of project documents and evaluations, specially commissioned updates from ten countries, and a huge body of academic literature. We were struck by the host of issues subsumed under `slum upgrading' and the diversity of opinions on each. Clearly, there was variation in project performance and significant innovation in practice, but, on balance, the critics had been more articulate and seemed to have won the case. In our paper, instead of debating whether upgrading was a success or failure, we decided to highlight `what had worked, what had not, and why?' We also chose to focus on two aspects that were emerging as key determinants of living conditions in slumso tenure and infrastructure. Most of the literature focuses on either one or the other, but we felt that they are strongly related and needed to be understood in concert with each other. Revisiting ... Retrieving the baby from the bathwater: slum upgrading in Sub-Saharan Africa