City wide slum upgrading and prevention strategy in Kigali, Rwanda

Within the framework of UN Habitat work in Rwanda, Fernando Murillo is participating as external advisor for the City of Kigali (CoK) on the formulation of a city-wide strategy for upgrade and prevention of informal settlements. In the case of Kigali, and in Rwanda in general, since 2008, the Government of Rwanda (GoR) has carried out a massive land regularization plan providing secure land tenure (within different titling systems) aiming to stop and prevent informal urbanization trends. The previous informal settlements because lacking secure land tenure has become now unplanned and under-serviced areas that the GoR CoK is seeking to upgrade now. In just a few years after the massive regularization process, the new land owners start to allocate rental housing facilities in their premises worsening living conditions of the growing tenant populations in their plots. The challenge to carry out slum upgrading in areas already subdivided and allocated to land owners, now obtaining profits from their plots and in many cases, depending of the site, even not living anymore in the settlement result extremely complex to address. As a result, a new generation of city-wide informal settlement upgrading projects need to be launched including more smart rules to control land markets and create an enabling framework for rental markets. This is on going consultancy is expected to deliver in november 2016 an innovative approach overcoming the typical problems of slum upgrading as urban segregation and fragmentation contributing on the other hand to the implementation of Kigali master plan. Results of this exercise should provide on one hand, a criteria for interventions reconciling human rights and sustainable urban development indicators and on the other hand, a way forward to enhance land owners and tenants linkages to work together in improving quality of life in their neighborhoods, taking advantage of the on-going development process happening at the city wide and country as a whole. From this perspective, city wide works as a tool to capture development opportunities towards unprivileged areas, reverting in this way socio-territorial segregation trends.