The high school in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, usually volunteers with Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program. With the COVID-19 pandemic going on, there was no way they could travel to the build site. Many students know how important a decent home to protect against diseases. They decided to raise and donate funds to Habitat for home construction. In these difficult times, the school collected 16,000 USD to support Habitat programs in Lebanon and India.

The Dhahran High School has been partnering with Habitat since 2009. They completed 27 volunteer builds with almost 600 participants. “Going virtual due to the pandemic was a challenge for the school’s Habitat for Humanity club. Each year, the organization depends on student-organized and student-led events to raise funds. Seeing that in-person activities are no longer possible, the club’s executive team came up with a plan,” explained Alichia Gerber, a teacher at DHS. The club launched their first ever year-long group competition: dividing members into groups to compete against each other in raising funds. Throughout the year, they held virtual events to benefit the housing cause.

“The year started with the virtual iDo Series, 12 student-led sessions teaching everything from cooking to painting and more. Later, students also engaged in tutoring, baby sitting and selling homemade masks to raise funds,” said Alichia Gerber. In the second semester, students organized a Walkathon Month, when club members walked, ran, biked, and swam to reach the club’s goal of covering distance from Lebanon to India, a total of 4,400 km. As students did this, they also recruited sponsors to donate money for the distance they travelled. The final fundraiser was called the Habitat Garage Sale, when students sold what they had or created and donated proceeds to Habitat. At the end of the year, students had opportunities to create Habitat displays to convey what they had learned and take extra online courses to educate themselves about Habitat and housing.

Students presented two cheques, totaling USD 16,000, for Lebanon and Habitat India during the online sessions with representatives of Habitat for Humanity from the area office, volunteering programs and countries, India and Lebanon.

In episode 3 of our podcast series, we talk about informal settlements in Africa with Charles Witbooi, Program Head for Advocacy and Volunteering Engagement at Habitat for Humanity South Africa.

The first very important point Charles clarifies is the term “slum” itself. In South Africa, “slum” is not used due to its political implications. The country’s past was marked by Slum Clearance Acts, which were used by the government to evict people who lived in poor conditions. For this reason, the preferred terms are “informal settlements” or “squatter camps”.

As in other parts of the world, despite the different terms, what they describe is areas where people live in temporary households and without basic services. However, the degree of poverty varies from one settlement to the other; some of them have rudimentary services – shared toilets or electricity – some have none.

In South Africa, the origins of informal settlements can be traced back to the years of segregation. In those days, the population was segmented according to official racial groups which all had their own geographical area to live in.

After 1994, the year when segregation ended, and the country opened to the world. Black South Africans, who until then had been cut out of key areas of the economy, had the chance to get job opportunities and move freely, often closer to big cities. As a result, the number of informal settlements around urban areas grew quickly.

As of today, the biggest squatter camps are indeed located around metropolitan cities, such as Johannesburg, the centre of economic life, Soweto, or Cape Town, Khayelitsha.

The latter for example, Khayelitsha, is a suburb of Cape Town, which features a variety of different living conditions: from formal housing with decent economic opportunities and even some basic services to areas where services are very limited, with no access to running water or electricity.

In addition, in the Cape Town area, informal settlements are often located 30-35km or more from the urban core, which is the centre of all economic activities. Therefore, people can really find themselves marginalised in many ways. Being so isolated, these areas often do not represent a pleasant or safe environment, especially for women and children.

The housing diversity in settlements such as Khayelitsha is mainly due to the policies of last 27 years. Since then, the government has been giving free housing to those eligible. However, the process often takes longer than expected, and many have been on a waiting list for years.

Since there is no money to acquire a house on the market, most people have no other alternatives than keep living in informal, temporary settlements while hoping and waiting for the next housing project to improve the quality of their lives.

What people living in squatter camps all tend to share is a life on a very low income. However, the reasons why they chose to live there can be different for each community. In the metropolitan areas, for example, most people came from rural areas – where there are less opportunities – in order to find a better job, better education for their children, or simply better social services, and live in temporary housing in the meantime.

As much as we like to feature success stories of the people we support, however, not many South Africans living in those conditions have to opportunity to make it and improve their life conditions, which is why our work with these communities is so critical.

The current pandemic has highlighted the core of the issue: shelter. When people have access to proper housing, hygiene can be preserved, and distancing or self-isolation can be easily put into practice, so that is the starting point for a change.

The process, according to Charles Witbooi, should be driven by the government but should have all actors – NGOs, local communities, companies – actively involved, each playing their own role but all working together to achieve a common goal – improving the life conditions of the informal settlements’ dwellers.

In Charles’s opinion, a home is a place where a family can live together in a secure environment, with sufficient space and, most importantly, with dignity. A place that allows children to go to school and study safely, so that they can improve the quality of their lives in the future, if compared to previous generations. This is what all housing projects should be based on: the promise of a place one can become proud owner of and, finally, the transformation of that promise into a reality.

Home Sapiens podcast was produced as a part of the Build Solid Ground Project, founded by the European Union, Habitat for Humanity. Its content is the sole responsibility of Habitat for Humanity and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union

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In episode 5, we focus on young people and the struggles they face in their everyday lives. This time, our guest is Linus Wahome, CEO of ManPro Systems, a Kenyan tech company. We will take a walk through his life, to better understand the challenges he – as many others – faced as a kid and the path that led him to become an entrepreneur at a young age. 

When Linus was a child, getting a formal education was very challenging. Most families struggled to afford it despite its relatively low costs. It was common that half the class could not regularly attend school, as the parents did not always have enough to pay the school fees.

Too dark and too noisy to study

Housing conditions also created an obstacle to education: at home, for example, they did not have electricity, which made it impossible to do homework in the evening. Linus remembers trying to finish work before dark, as the only lamp in the house was shared by the whole family.

He was amongst the lucky ones, though: most of his school friends lived in overcrowded houses, where constant noise was added to the list of hurdles to concentration.

All of that reflected on the quality of life those kids now have as adults: due to poor and discontinuous education, many of Linus’s schoolmates could not take advantage of formal job opportunities and ended up struggling through life.

Pushing to send more into higher education in Kenya

Luckily, nowadays the situation is definitely improving: thanks to the government, primary education is not only compulsory but also accessible to everybody. However, the quality of education is often compromised as, to keep the costs down, a single class might have from 50 up to 100 children with only one teacher.

Since free primary education has been introduced, the government has also been pushing on a 100% transition from primary to high school, which is also partly free. Parents still must cover some fees and uniforms, but books are provided. Thanks to this, the transition level is very high.

When it comes to transition from high school to university, however, situation gets harder. Once again, the challenge is affordability, as not everybody has the money to attend it.

Getting the entrepreneurial bug

What gave Linus the motivation to start his own business were exactly the struggles his family faced when he was young: their economic situation was not easy, and while his father was working in IT, his mother was an entrepreneur, engaging in all sorts of businesses to make sure they would always have food on the table.

She sold clothes, she got into a construction business, supplying materials,, and that example planted a seed in young Linus: it made him admire the hard work and ingenuity of the people who started their own business.

When in high school, he followed the same example and, in order to have pocket money without having to ask his parents, he spent his holidays either selling charcoal to the local hotels and restaurants, or jewellery to his classmates.

That is when he started noticing opportunities everywhere. That is how ManPro was born to find a tech solution to construction issues.

Home is the cornerstone of children’s development

Home was the key to Linus’s success, and still today it has a special place in his heart. To him, when you are a kid, home is where you get ideas about how life is going to be in the future; it is supposed to be a place where you find peace, in contrast with all the conflicts that are outside – which unfortunately is not the case for many Kenyan families.

It should be a place of happiness, joy, and laughter, where you can always be yourself, without the need to prove anything to anybody. The simple things of life should be enjoyed within the context of home since that enables you to be more productive in the outer world.

The COVID pandemic has made people appreciate home more. Being forced to stay in our homes, people had to face and solve whatever challenges were there.

As a successful entrepreneur – or, as he says, an entrepreneur on the path to success – Linus thinks we should all put more effort in our homes, , because at the end of the day that is what matters and those are the people we come back to.

Home Sapiens podcast was produced as a part of the Build Solid Ground Project, founded by the European Union, Habitat for Humanity. Its content is the sole responsibility of Habitat for Humanity and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union

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