Informal Settlement Network

The Informal Settlement Network (ISN) is an alliance of settlement-level and national-level organizations of informal settlement dwellers in South Africa. These include a wide range of organizations at the national level, including settlements linked to the Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP), Abahlali baseMjondolo, South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO), StreetNet, and many others. The ISN is supported by the Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC) and Shack / Slum Dwellers International (SDI).

The ISN has three primary objectives. The first is to create solidarity and unity of the urban poor so that they are well organized, and equipped with the skills, knowledge and scale needed to create meaningful change. Secondly, ISN is building a national urban network of the poor for learning and lobbying so that local, community-level initiatives drive any citywide or national agenda, city governments are obliged to consult communities in development plans, and communities develop the capacity to hold local authorities, especially at ward council level to account. The final goal is to change the way our cities are planned and developed and how public funds are used so that they are inclusive, and that ordinary people are involved.

The unique community organization methods of the ISN facilitate the developmental capacity of this structure. This is a network of existing settlement-level and national-level structures, and is not an organization. It is bottom-up, not top-down, and there are no structures within ISN besides the coordinating committee.

ISN employs specific strategies to work towards people-driven development for South Africa’s urban poor…

1) Learning by doing — ISN is already setting up pilot projects for informal settlement upgrading in every one of the five cities. At the same time, profiling and enumerating every informal settlement, backyard shack and RDP “slum” in every city is underway. Gathering information allows ISN to build an unprecedented community-driven informaiton base, and also to deepen the connections between settlements within the context of the network. As this process unfolds, the network is prioritizing community exchanges to and from these projects. Professionals, councilors and politicians are being engaged in these projects to support people-driven processes. These alliance serve to ensure that the lessons learned from the pilots translate into change in policy, as well as general changes in the public discourse around informal settlements and urban poverty.

2) Working with communities who are ready to help themselves.

3) Breaking the culture of entitlement, and dependency on Government. In fact, the ISN is already proving to be a resource for government at all levels, as local municipalities are drawing on ISN city-wide profiling data, and the national government has engaged the ISN to profile even more cities.

4) Building and drawing on internal capacities as the basis for drawing in external support.

ISN is spearheading the Land and Right to the City Campaign, a new approach to improving both the ties of citizenship and the material lives of ordinary poor, urban dwellers, by putting organized communities of the urban poor at the centre of incremental approaches to the upgrading of informal settlements and security of land tenure.

1) The establishment of city wide joint forums inclusive of politicians, officials, all service providers and organized civil society working within the settlements (that will highlight the right to the city through a focus on the proposed pilots.

2) Register and survey all informal structures in the city and make information available to community structures.

3) Identify and prioritize land and infrastructure projects for implementation (land access, basic services, upgrading, relocation).

4) Begin implementation.

Ongoing activities in this campaign:

— Work with established capacities in organizations of the urban poor to develop appropriate savings-based financial models that enable poor households to gain access to affordable finance and upgrade housing.

— Develop capacity of communities (through exposure to pilots) to plan and implement upgrading and relocation projects.

— Develop multi-dimensional media campaign to highlight landlessness and urban poverty (sms bundles, websites, marches, demonstations, building relationships with press, etc.