A new blog has been posted by Caroline Knowles on Medium.
Challenges facing vulnerable residents in Nairobi, Kenya
A new blog by Caroline Knowles (Programme Manager for British Academy’s GCRF Urban Infrastructures of Well-Being Programme) vividly describes the challenges and hardships faced by residents living in informal settlements such as Mathare in Nairobi. She reports on how researchers on Equitable Mobility have been undertaking transect walks with local vulnerable residents, to identify the obstacles and difficulties they face moving around their city.
Residents have also been capturing their day-to-day problems of navigating across the city by producing digital stories. These are first-person perspective short videos which are planned and written by the residents themselves. These will be presented at stakeholder workshops next year aimed at identifying solutions to the problems identified through improvements to road infrastructure.
Resident with visual disability tells his story getting around Likoni, near Mombasa, Kenya
Mathare and Likoni communities use participatory journey mapping
For many East African residents, travel around cities is problematic due to lack, or poor provision of, walking and cycling infrastructure. This is compounded by traffic congestion leading to long travel times for commuting or going to school. Also, exposure to pollution and road safety hazards during these journeys may impact people’s health and wellbeing. Vulnerable urban residents including the poor, persons living with disability (PWD) and children are particularly affected by these impacts.
Therefore, co-designed solutions to improve their mobility, allowing for better access to work, education, healthcare and opportunities, are desperately needed. Specifically, city planners need to improve access and provision of transport services, as well as delivering improvements to road infrastructure, safety and security. These were the findings from recent workshops held in two Kenyan cities.
The mobility of vulnerable urban residents is often challenged by road safety hazards, as shown in the picture above of Likoni District of Mombasa County. Photo: Omangi, S/ SEI.
Study locations – Mathare and Likoni Kenya
As part of the British Academy funded Equitable Mobility project, participatory journey mapping workshops were held with community members from two informal settlements – Mathare in Nairobi, and Likoni in Mombasa County.
Mathare is a large informal settlement in Nairobi that borders two major transport corridors, the Thika Highway and Juja Road, both of which are part of the upcoming Nairobi Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) System.
Likoni is a densely populated neighbourhood located south of Mombasa Island, separated by the Likoni Channel. Residents either use the ferry or the newly constructed ‘floating bridge’ to access the island or the north coast.
Scenes from Likoni
Street Vendor – Likoni, Mombasa County, Kenya. Photo: Omangi, S. / SEI
Street scene – Likoni, Mombasa County, Kenya. Photo: Omangi, S. / SEI
Lack of safe road crossings for school children – Likoni, Mombasa County, Kenya. Photo: Omangi, S. / SEI
Flooding issues – Likoni, Mombasa County, Kenya. Photo: Omangi, S. / SEI
Mixed road use- Likoni, Mombasa County, Kenya. Photo: Omangi, S. / SEI
Lack of pavements a road safety issue – Likoni, Mombasa County, Kenya. Photo: Omangi, S. / SEI
Flooding issues – Likoni, Mombasa County, Kenya. Photo: Omangi, S. / SEI
What is participatory mapping?
Participatory mapping evolved from the combination of Geographic Information Technologies (GIT)with Participatory Learning and Action (PLA)methods typically used for natural resource use assessments (see Corbett & Keller, 2006). Its purpose is to:
Integrate local stakeholder knowledge spatially
Provide public access to spatial data
Encourage greater participation in decision making
Create dialogue between local stakeholders, planners, environmental modellers and policy makers – to improve decision outcomes
Participatory mapping that is carried out with members of a community, and which can be used to represent the views of some, or all members of that community, can be referred to as “community mapping” (Forrester & Cinderby, 2012).
Community mapping in informal settlements during COVID pandemic
Five workshops were held in the two cities during 2021, with each community targeting the following groups: the elderly, children, women, persons with disability (PWD) and youth. The workshops were held to understand how the journeys they take, and the daily challenges and risks they confront, that affect their health and wellbeing, both psychologically and physically. Solutions to the problems/barriers identified were also sought from the participants.
During the workshops, participants were first asked to list their regular journeys such as travelling to work or school, shopping and visiting their places of worship, along with the transport modes they usually took. They then rated their experience of taking each journey as being: pleasurable, pleasurable with some challenges, undesirable or very undesirable.
This initial stage of the mapping found that over 40% of the participants, in both cities, walk as their primary means of transport. It was evident that in places where there is poor provision of Non-Motorised Transport (NMT) infrastructure, journeys tended to be rated as less desirable.
Participants then mapped their journeys using different transport modes on large-format maps. They identified the locations where they faced challenges during the journeys; places where the journeys were desirable; and then they were asked to propose possible solutions to the identified challenges.
Mathare Community PGIS-map Map showing participants walking journeys in and around Mathare, Nairobi.
The key challenges faced by many participants, in both workshops were: security, poor NMT infrastructure, encroachment by informal vendors along pedestrian paths and non-existent infrastructure for PWDs.
Proposed solutions included: providing street lighting, training of the Boda-boda (two-wheeler motorcycle) and Tuk-tuk (three-wheeler motorcycle) taxi riders to be more considerate of passengers with mobility challenges, and improved road signage. Another recommendation was to extend transport infrastructure into the settlements, not just limit it to main roads and highways.
Likoni Community PGIS-map Map showing participants walking journeys in and around Likoni, Mombasa County.
Participants highlighted how places with pedestrian bridges and ramps (e.g. Thika Highway in Nairobi), streetlights and traffic calming measures made their journeys safer and more pleasurable.
Experiences were shared, further challenges uncovered and solutions were proposed during the plenary sessions.
The research team is now preparing to undertake some of the journeys mapped by the participants to investigate in more detail the impact of the different routes and infrastructure on the environment and on their health and wellbeing.
Tell us about your travel experiences and suggest solutions to make it better.
Join the Stockholm Environment Institute based in Nairobi, who are collaborating with the University of York, UK on Equitable Mobility, to look at issues around mobility and wellbeing in urban areas. We are focusing our work on Mombasa and Nairobi, Kenya.
We are using an online mapping tool, to record individuals’ journeys and the challenges they face en-route, for a broad cross-section of users.
We want to work with residents to understand how travel affects them personally by making maps of local journey patterns (by foot, bicycle, car, matatu etc.) We want people to share both positive and negative journey experiences in the cities.
The information provided will then be used by the project to identify where cities face similar types of problems or where positive benefits are experienced on specific routes, map hotspot locations of where these are and to co-generate ideas for solutions with local stakeholders.
Click the links or scan the QR code for your city.
This project undertook research in two Kenyan cities, Nairobi and Mombasa. It aimed to develop stakeholder-led solutions to achieve sustainable and equitable mobility, grounded in a better understanding of the issue and the health impacts it causes.
The ultimate goal was to foster a comprehensive approach to mobility that prioritizes the well-being of individuals and the community as a whole. This necessitated a deep understanding of the challenges faced by the cities’ residents and the environmental implications of current mobility practices.
Equitable Mobility finished in 2023. Three policy briefs were produced from the research undertaken. The research took place during the difficult period of the global pandemic and so the project team would like to thank the gracious participation from the residents of Mathare (Nairobi) and Likoni (Mombasa), as well as all the other stakeholders involved during the project.
We will be holding a series of workshops with different stakeholders in the coming months but we want to assure everyone taking part that we take COVD-19 very seriously and will put in measures to ensure we minimise any risk. These are:
Equitable Mobility for Health and Well-being 