Housing exchange for India's slum dwellers

The international exchanges between slum residents in Asia and Africa are aimed at helping the urban poor share information.

"We found that this was one of the most powerful ways of getting communities to link to each other and to work out ways to learn from each other," Sheela Patel, Director, Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) told BBC World Service.

Knowledge

Having witnessed the exchange of knowledge in local slum communities in India, the Bombay based non governmental organization are now applying the system to the poor housing districts of South Africa.

From how to form political organisations and small banking systems, to daily necessities such as how to build a toilet, residents are encouraged to share relevant local information.

A long running initiative, Ms Patel told the One Planet programme how inside information was crucial to success.

"They have literally taught each other everything," she said.

"In other projects you might have a global strategy," she added, "but to embed it in a local community you need the very residents to agree to it and to transplant it.

Who are those people in development? They are the poor people."

Growth

One resident who has been to South Africa four times told of how he had shared his Bombay slum experiences with his African counterparts.

He compared his living conditions and concluded, "conditions are very bad [in South Africa]. They are growing much faster than us."

Huge migration has seen Bombay adding about half a million people every year to its total population of 13 million.

It is estimated that approximately 50% of the population of the commercial capital live in slum housing.

Self-help

According to the SPARC spokesperson most of these "pavement" people came to the city from the country in the 1970s, "with no assets at all and chose to live in a location which was close to where they found a job."

Ms Patel claims that slowly the government has recognized the problems that dense areas of poverty face.

Calling on the support of NGOs, Ms Patel said that the government were now backing such self-help initiatives.

She asserted, "studies show that this produced far more powerful, political, social and economic transformations than getting consultants who would just sit and write a proposal but not back it with action or with long term commitment for change."