Armed with data, slum dwellers demand better services

Labourers construct a structure amidst shanties in Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums, in Mumbai, India. From Africa to Latin America, activists and residents are teaming up to collect information like family sizes and settlement plans to lobby authorities for investment in public services like sanitation and waste collection. — Reuters

JOHANNESBURG/RIO DE JANEIRO: When 46-year-old data collector Mfanzile Msibi and his team started mapping slums more than a decade ago near Johannesburg, they realised that tens of thousands of slum dwellers were unaccounted for in government records.

The local Ekurhuleni government, a city east of Johannesburg, had recognised 102 slum settlements in 2009, but the Informal Settlement Network (ISN), a South African social movement, found that over a dozen communities were missing from records.