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Urban Launch Documentary

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Nuvoni@dmin

Post Date

April 15, 2023

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Last year, Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research , International Centre for Frugal Innovation, and Vital Cities and Citizens launched a “3-year Urban Programme on Resilience in Kenya’s informal settlements.” The impact-driven Programme seeks to accelerate community-led action research and cross-sectoral collaboration in the following interdisciplinary domains

Adaptive Governance – Examining formal-informal mechanisms that can address disaster risk in its multilevel nature while coordinating action and authority across governments, market, and social actors.
Resilience – Where the agenda is framed with communities through an evidence-base and supported at city, national, and supra-national scales.
Inclusivity - Supporting the agency of community/grassroots actors, and putting communities at the centre
Frugality – Building an agenda on how the available minimal resources can be maximized for resilience building.

The newly launched Urban Research and Collaboration Hub will generate knowledge on vulnerability and resilience, inclusivity and frugal innovations, and informal disaster risk governance mechanisms in the next three years, while collaborating with like-minded organizations to catalyze impactful research and actions

Projects Completed By The Hub

The project compared and explored the evolutionary processes through which two large informal settlements in Nairobi became more resilient to shocks and disturbances. The research explored the different coping strategies that emerge and vary with space and time

This research conducted in Dandora aimed to identify resilient community initiatives to help children, the youth and the larger Dandora community cope with the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 to foster their social and economic well-being.

Ongoing Projects

This project aims to explore various activities conducted by slum dwellers in coping with shocks and stresses. The exercise identified various digital and non-digital activities used by the pro-poor to mitigate and adapt to shocks and stresses.

This research aims to co-create a framework for partnership and engagement in participatory community research in informal settlements. The study is being piloted in Mathare, Kenya’s third-largest informal settlement. The research has been motivated by the need to formalize Mathare settlements as a Special Planning Area, also forming part of the MSPARC agenda to activate the community’s role in gathering meaningful spatial and non-spatial evidence that would enable an effective upgrading of Mathare slums.

ICFI-Kenya convenes Mathare Special Planning Area Research Collective (MSPARC), a consortium of NGOs, local organizations, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and community researchers working towards formalizing Mathare as a Special Planning Area to accelerate impactful research and slum upgrading process.