Off the Grid in Nairobi

Reuters AlertNet profiles Crispian Amolo, a asthmatic 54-year-old tailor who “built a one-room mud shack four months ago for his wife and seven children in Nairobi’s Kibera slum — a sprawling area of shanty houses, open sewers, and mud lanes.” Upside: No need to come up with 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($14) rent every month. Downside: […]

Reuters AlertNet profiles Crispian Amolo, a asthmatic 54-year-old tailor who "built a one-room mud shack four months ago for his wife and seven children in Nairobi's Kibera slum — a sprawling area of shanty houses, open sewers, and mud lanes." Upside: No need to come up with 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($14) rent every month. Downside: No electricity, no running water, robbers and rapists, and a hole-in-the-ground toilet shared by 90 people. Did we mention the flies?

As writer Marie-Louise Gumuchian notes:

Amolo is just one of an estimated one billion slum dwellers in the world. Kibera, east Africa's largest slum, houses over 600,000 people in a packed 3 km (1.8 miles) corridor.

The world's slum population is expected to grow by 27 million per year between 2000-2020, according to the U.N. Human Settlements Programme U.N.-HABITAT. In sub-Saharan Africa, about 72 percent of the urban population already live in slums, and the annual growth rate is the highest in the world at 4.53 percent.

Kiberab

"At least this is my own home," says Amolo. "But I would like electricity and a cement floor." And, presumably, ubiquitous wireless.