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Slum upgrading has received intense attention in the Global South, particularly among stakeholders. This study aims to examine government policy priorities towards slum management with the view of establishing its level of commitment in terms of measures undertaken and identify specific policies to structure the sector.

The study systematically reviewed national policies, guided by the frequency statistics method in identifying key issues relating to slums management. Content analysis was used to identify findings into themes and discussed in line with the study’s objectives.

The results revealed the government’s determination to upgrade the existing slums, with the establishment of a Ministry for Inner City and Zongo Development to facilitate collaboration between stakeholders in the value chain of slum management. Furthermore, the study established government’s resolve to strengthen the Local Government Act, 1993, and the National Development Planning Act, 1994 within context to pave way for slums upgrading.

The study used a national policy framework to inform the conclusion reached. Further studies are needed in similar contexts to understand the inputs of government and stakeholders and their contributions towards slum management. This would further expand the frontiers of knowledge in the domain.

The findings revealed policy-driven that can be used by policymakers, practitioners, housing managers and other relevant stakeholders to create workable policies for slum management.

This study provides first insight into government commitment to slums management using national policy documents in context.

Across the global community the eradication of slums has been identified as a key project as part of the broader goal to eradicate poverty. Entrepreneurial efforts are viewed as a key means of ‘lifting’ people from poverty. Through a focus on Nigeria, this chapter examines slum upgrading programmes. The primary aim is to identify the opportunities and barriers facing inhabitants of informal settlements to realising entrepreneurial synergies that can occur in particular places.

A case study examination of the Kpirikpiri informal settlement in Ebonyi State, Nigeria was conducted that utilised a mixed-method approach. The research passed through three key phases. The first phase comprised a literature survey and review. The second phase involved a household survey to gather some baseline socio-economic and physical data that helped to fill the void of basic data. A total of 142 respondents participated in the survey, representing 10% of the total number of households in the area. The third phase involved the collection of qualitative data through focus group discussions and individual interviews.

Slum dwellers have skills and formal education equivalent to those in the Global North. Nevertheless, Nigerians tend to view entrepreneurial activities as secondary to other forms of employment, especially positions in the public sector. Paradoxically, slum dwellers place little trust in state authorities. Security of tenure is a major barrier to expanding entrepreneurial activities, as many landlords are reluctant to permit tenants to operate home-based enterprises, which is often a neglected element of place-based development strategies.

The chapter demonstrates the need for basic socio-economic datasets alongside user perspectives to shape the efficacy of development initiatives. In the case of Kpirikpiri, slum improvement programmes may have benefited from parallel educational programmes that expound the virtues of entrepreneurialism and concomitant training schemes, improved governance open to local social networks, less emphasis on physical upgrading of some forms of infrastructure and greater attention towards improving security of tenure as a path towards generating more home-based enterprises.

The entrepreneurial potential of the inhabitants of informal settlements is under-acknowledged in ‘upgrading’ interventions and also underplayed in the research literature. The chapter draws some much needed critical attention to the opportunities and barriers facing inhabitants of informal settlements, which helps to challenge some dominant transnational policy assumptions.

Slum discourse has attracted significant research interest among scholars. The study examined the policy framework for slum governance in Ghana with the goal of offering recommendations to structure slum management.

Anchored on exploratory qualitative methodology, the study utilized a purposive sampling technique to select 18 respondents from the major ministries for in-depth interviews.

The results showed an absence of a central national policy for slum governance because slums development has received less national priority. It also revealed a lack of coordination among the sector ministries in policy formulation, which tends to create a blame game among them. Further, it was found that slum programs are driven by media-political and non-governmental actors.

The conclusion and the outcome of this study cannot be generalized as to represent the whole ministries in Ghana in the space of slums management due to the qualitative approach. A recommendation is offered for the creation of a separate authority to take charge of the slums in Ghana.

This study elucidates a context-specific understanding of the policy framework for slum governance, which tends to shape public knowledge and policy landscape.

As a novelty, the findings of the study advanced the sparse literature in the domain and, at the same time, helped politicians and policymakers understand the need for a dedicated policy for slums.

The study examined the influence of slums on policies affecting the slums' lives in Ghana.

An exploratory qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews (IDIs) was used to select 24 respondents using purposive and snowball sampling techniques.

The findings show that slum dwellers have an adequate understanding of policies that affect the dwellers' lives. Furthermore, slum dwellers use statutory, technological, media and right-to-vote-based strategies to influence government policies. This also indicates that implemented policies do not align with realities in the slums

The outcome of this study cannot be generalised to represent the whole population of slums due to the inherent limitations associated with a qualitative design

This study uncovers context-specific strategies through which slum residents influence policies. The study concedes that policy actors involve the slums in policies that affect their livelihoods

The results are unique not only to developing countries, but are also useful to other economies with similar characteristics.

Achieving tenure security is a global challenge impacting cities of the global south. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role of technology-enabled solutions as an enabler for the tenure rights of slum dwellers.

In this paper, we adopted a case study approach to analyze the use cases for technologies aiding India’s securitization of land tenure. The flagship state mission of Odisha, named the Jaga Mission, and that of Punjab, named BASERA – the Chief Minister’s Slum Development Program – were used as cases for this paper.

It was found that technologies like drone imagery and digital surveys fast-tracked the data collection and helped in mapping the slums with accuracy, mitigating human errors arising during measurement – a necessary condition for ensuring de jure tenure security. The adoption of a technology-based solution, along with a suitable policy and legal framework, has helped in the distribution of secure land titles to the slum dwellers in these states.

Odisha’s and Punjab’s journey in using technology to enable tenure security for its urban poor residents can serve as a model for the cities of the global south, dealing with the challenges of providing secure tenure and property rights.

This paper aims to measure multi-dimensional poverty in Lagos State slums. This study is relevant because slums are becoming a present-day reality for urban cities and it is now paramount to understand the dynamics of deprivations suffered under various dimensions in the slums.

A multi-stage sampling technique is used to sample 400 respondents from five slums (Makoko, Iwaya, Ilaje, IjoraBadia and Amukoko) in Lagos State and information have gotten using a structured questionnaire. The fuzzy set approach to measuring multi-dimensional poverty index (MPI) is used in estimating the MPI for the slums.

The findings from the study show that although all the slums have varying MPI; however, the average MPI for the slums is 0.49. Further findings show that majority of the households are largely deprived in the education dimension, proceeded by the living standards dimension and finally, health dimension.

The current study focused on a few selected slums in Lagos State and findings show that it may be erroneous to absolutely adopt policy implications derived for other major slums in cities around the world.

This study advances the frontier of slum studies in Nigeria by following an analytical path in understanding the degree of poverty in the slums.

Inadequate housing is a crisis that affects all areas of the world. The severity and magnitude of this crisis has been augmented by the exponential growth in the global population. Expounding upon this problem, particularly in the South, is the migration of rural peoples into urban cores, fostering the creation of mega-cities of illegally developed, inadequate housing. These developments lack basic necessities including access to water, proper sanitation, and safe areas to prepare food.

Urban agriculture has presented itself as a key design component in the mission to alleviate the aforementioned crisis. The incorporation of agriculture as a permanent and edible design feature bolsters the design methodology of sustainable urban fabrics by presenting opportunities of cohesion between built and cultural landscapes. Research on one of the largest slum developments, known as Kibera, in Kenya provides a design study in which the addition of edible landscapes contributes to the neighborhood “njia” infrastructure. The term njia refers to the street paths and alleyways that bind the developments. When applied to the model of njia, the potential benefits of the incorporation of urban agriculture into the contextual vocabulary become clear. Designing edible landscapes as a feature of permanence in urban design situations provides the potential to address critical issues concerning development of housing, city planning, and food security.

This chapter aims to discuss the segmented city in the less developed world, focusing on its informal settlements. The main assumption is that the walls of informal settlements change from rigid to fuzzy ones, as they are analyzed using finer scales. In order to show this change, this chapter is divided into four sections. The first section analyzes the changes in two types of urban structure model: the segregated city model and the segmented city model. The second section describes the changes in governmental intervention models for informal settlements in Latin American cities, emphasizing what has been happening in the city of Recife, Brazil. The third section investigates the fact that, despite the changes in terms of governmental intervention models for informal settlements, there are still limits on the official city maps that effectively impede any appropriate representation of them. In order to show the gaps between the official cartographic representations and the reality of informal settlements, the last section of this chapter analyzes in more depth the walls of one specific informal settlement in Recife called Brasília Teimosa. This finer scale analysis allows us to see that its walls are even more fuzzy and permeable than the walls of the many formal settlements.

The purpose of this paper is to examine pro-poor urban asset adaptation to climate variability and change. It constructs a conceptual framework that explores the appropriate asset adaptation strategies for extreme poor households as well as the process of supporting these households and groups in accumulating these assets.

Qualitative data are obtained from life histories, key informant interviews (KIIs) and focus-group discussions (FGDs). These data are collected, coded and themed.

This research identifies that households among the urban extreme poor do their best to adapt to perceived climate changes; however, in the absence of savings, and access to credit and insurance, they are forced to adopt adverse coping strategies. Individual adaptation practices yield minimal results and are short lived and even harmful because the urban extreme poor are excluded from formal policies and institutions as they lack formal rights and entitlements. For the poorest, the process of facilitating and maintaining patron–client relationships is a central coping strategy. Social policy approaches are found to be effective in facilitating asset adaptation for the urban extreme poor because they contribute to greater resilience to climate change.

This study analyses the empirical evidence through the lens of a pro-poor asset-adaptation framework. It shows that the asset-transfer approach is an effective in building household-adaptation strategies. Equally important is the capacity to participate in and influence the institutions from which these people have previously been excluded.