Kenya moves families from Africa’s biggest shanty towns

Trucks have started to move 1,500 people out of Africa's largest shanty town. It may take as long as five years to clear the overcrowded Kibera shanty towns in Nairobi, which are home to about half the city’s population. The move is part of a $1.2 billion United Nations-backed plan to eradicate the city's shanty towns and re-house about two million people.

The first stage of the nine-year project, which has just started after a five-year delay, is expected to affect 7,500 who live in the shanty town. Their shanties will be knocked down and replaced with modern housing units. But not everyone is happy with the plan, which will force residents to pay about $10 (£6) a month in rent. Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who is the local MP, said the ground is being prepared for a "modern, low income residential estate with modern schools, markets, playgrounds and other facilities". Some families started to move their things in this morning. "I am a casual worker, sometimes I have rent and sometimes I don't and my (current) landlord understands this," John Mwangi, a 47-year-old stonemason told Associated Press news agency. The new houses are also far from the school that his five children attend, he said. “We've lived in Kibera long before Nairobi was Nairobi, long before Kenya was Kenya,” Ibrahim Diaby, an elder of the Nubian community - an ethnic group who have been living on the land for more than a century - told a BBC correspondent.

Many residents would prefer it, he said, if their existing housing were improved. "My house has water and electricity, but I'm restricted from putting up a permanent building because the government says the land belongs to them," he said. More than 80 people, a mix of residents and landlords have gone to court in a bid to stop the moves as they claim they own the land and the government should not be allowed to demolish the shacks. Landlords are also objecting to the plans because they will not be compensated for the informal shacks they rent out — even though no one living in the shacks has official ownership deeds to it. About 90% of Kibera residents rent their homes from middleclass Kenyans who have built temporary ‘homes’ on the government land over the last 30 years. The government will demolish the houses of those who moved out voluntarily and wait until a judgment is made by the high court on the landlords' suit, National Housing Permanent Secretary Tirop Kosgey told Associated Press news agency.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children