Sumila Gulyani

Mobility, Poverty, and Gender: Travel ‘Choices’ of Slum Residents in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract A survey of 4375 slum residents in Nairobi, Kenya, reveals that the majority cannot afford any of the motorized transport options in the city. They cope by limiting their travel outside their settlement and, if they do travel, by often ‘choosing’ to walk. As compared to the non‐poor, poor households are systematically worse off. But the burden of reduced mobility is borne disproportionately by women and children. Using joint‐choice modelling to empirically explore the travel ‘choices’ of Nairobi’s slum residents, we show that women, men, and children in this population face distinct barriers to access. We conclude that policy aiming to improve mobility and transport access for the poor needs to grapple not only with the crucial issue of affordability but also with specific constraints faced by women and children.

Effects of Poor Transportation on Lean Production and Industrial Clustering: Evidence from the Indian Auto Industry

Abstract Conventional wisdom suggests that poor transportation systems adversely affect industrial competitiveness by raising the unit cost of freight. This study finds that freight is neither the only nor the most significant cost that poor transportation creates for auto firms in India. Poor transportation also raises the damages incurred in transit, total inventories, and ordering and overhead costs. Worse, it creates external diseconomies by introducing inefficiencies and unreliability in the supply chain, making it difficult for assemblers to implement lean production. These external diseconomies—rather than excessive freight prices or other direct costs—may be the more debilitating impact of poor transportation infrastructure on industrial performance. In India, transportation constraints and the imperatives of lean production are driving assemblers to create auto clusters.

Poverty, living conditions, and infrastructure access: a comparison of slums in Dakar, Johannesburg, and Nairobi

In this paper the authors compare indicators of development, infrastructure, and living conditions in the slums of Dakar, Nairobi, and Johannesburg using data from 2004 World Bank surveys. Contrary to the notion that most African cities face similar slum problems, find that slums in the three cities differ dramatically from each other on nearly every indicator examined. Particularly striking is the weak correlation of measures of income and human capital with infrastructure access and quality of living conditions. For example, residents of Dakars slums have low levels of education and high levels of poverty but fairly decent living conditions. By contrast, most of Nairobis slum residents have jobs and comparatively high levels of education, but living conditions are but extremely bad . And in Johannesburg, education and unemployment levels are high, but living conditions are not as bad as in Nairobi. These findings suggest that reduction in income poverty and improvements in human development do not automatically translate into improved infrastructure access or living conditions. Since not all slum residents are poor, living conditions also vary within slums depending on poverty status. Compared to their non-poor neighbors, the poorest residents of Nairobi or Dakar are less likely to use water (although connection rates are similar) or have access to basic infrastructure (such as electricity or a mobile phone). Neighborhood location is also a powerful explanatory variable for electricity and water connections, even after controlling for household characteristics and poverty. Finally, tenants are less likely than homeowners to have water and electricity connections.

Living Conditions, Rents, and Their Determinants in the Slums of Nairobi and Dakar

Using data from 3,715 slum households in Nairobi and Dakar, we find living conditions for tenants are worse than for owners, although tenants pay significant rents. Compared to Nairobi, both nominal rents and living conditions are higher in Dakar. Despite differences in respective slum rental markets, determinants of rent in both cities are strikingly similar. Analysis suggests that tenure mix—proportion of tenants to owners—affects what is available for rent and overall living conditions. Ensuring a certain proportion of housing is owner occupied may be instrumental for delivering greater choice for tenants and better living conditions for all slum residents. (JEL R21)

The living conditions diamond: an analytical and theoretical framework for understanding slums

What constitutes a ‘slum’ is much debated in the urban poverty and affordable housing literature. We argue that a focus on living conditions can help clarify this and present a framework, the living conditions diamond, for detailing living conditions and determining how the settlements we deem ‘slums’ compare with each other and with nonslum settlements. The diamond distils living conditions into four dimensions: (i) tenure, (ii) infrastructure, (iii) unit quality, and (iv) neighbourhood and location. This framework depicts conditions in graphic terms enabling comparison of conditions within and across cities. The diamond moves us beyond the notion that slums are homogeneously poor in quality, and facilitates analyses that can reveal why they differ. Settlements in Nairobi, Kenya and Dakar, Senegal are compared.

Customer Orientation in the Context of Development Projects: Insights from the World Bank

Approximately half of the worlds current population lives in poverty, and more than 90% of those people live in developing countries with limited access to basic social and economic amenities. Mired in such widespread poverty, developing countries thus appear to offer little opportunity for the traditional role of marketing to facilitate the monetized exchange of private goods. However, as this synthesized review of the practice of customer orientation at the World Bank shows, fundamental marketing principles and practices play an important role in incorporating the voice and interest of the poor in the provision of public goods that are designed to improve their quality of life and standard of living. This role for marketing in developing economies helps create the necessary socioeconomic infrastructure to facilitate the emergence of vibrant exchange markets for private goods in which the traditional role of marketing plays out. This article helps develop a better appreciation of a typically overlooked dimension in marketings relationship to society in developing countries.

Innovating with Infrastructure: How India's Largest Carmaker Copes with Poor Electricity Supply

Abstract Conventional wisdom suggests that self-generation is a high-cost and inefficient—but often unavoidable—solution to unreliable public power supply in developing countries. This article examines the power problem from the perspective of a large industrial user and its upstream supplier firms in India. It analyzes the innovative generation and power-sharing system that this firm has devised to solve both its own power problems as well as those facing some of its suppliers. This research finds not only that self-generation is economical but also that self-generation combined with power-sharing serves as a “model” that policy makers can replicate to ameliorate the power problems plaguing firms in developing countries.

Informal Rental Markets: The Low-Quality, High-Price Puzzle in Nairobi’s Slums

In The Challenge of Slums the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat, 2003) estimates that 870 million people in developing countries lived in urban slums in 2001. It also estimates that if present trends continue unchecked, the number of slum residents will grow to approximately 1.43 billion by 2020. The influential development targets known as the Millennium Development Goals, agreed to by world leaders at UN-sponsored summits in 2000 and 2002, include a commitment to significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020 (UN-Habitat, 2003). In Kenya, similar to other developing countries, this commitment now appears in national development plans and is highlighted as a key task in the National Economic Recovery Strategy (Government of Kenya, 2003).