By Anami Daudi
Coordinator
Mukuru Community Justice Center
Photo credits Anami Daudi Toure
Nairobi is one of the most densely populated cities in East and Central Africa. Over 60 percent of its people live in informal settlements: Mukuru, Mathare, Kibra, Dandora, Korogocho, Kawangware. The existence and placement of these slums is not accidental. They exist because the city needs cheap labour close by.
The private sector depends on informal workers who accept low wages. Those same workers cannot afford housing near their jobs, so they settle where rent is low and regulation is absent. The result is a population that works for the city but lives below the poverty line, in housing, schools, and clinics that the state has failed to build for them. They are considered as informal residents of Nairobi, and thus outsiders.
As it is, the Kenya Kwanza government’s affordable housing programme is presented as the answer. Investors like it. Tenderpreneurs love it. And media jouses work hand in hand with the government, to present the houses as such. But for the residents of Mukuru, it does not match what their lived experience with basic housing, or lack thereof.
The record on the ground tells a different story. In December 2021, the state evicted 40,000 people. In early 2024, over 180,000 families were forcefuly evicted from the riparian land corridor, with utmost focus on those in informal settlements. In December 2025, more than 27,000 people were evicted from their homes in Mukuru alone, on a promise that housing would follow. Each time, impoverished residents expected to be first in line for the housing programme built in their place. Each time, that has not happened.
Even for the few who did receive houses, the programme has failed to answer a basic question: how does a family survive once it is moved to the new houses?
Take a githeri vendor who has sold food in Mukuru for over a decade. Her customers are her neighbours, other informal workers, people who buy on credit and pay when they can. Move her into a housing block outside that economy, and she loses her customers along with her home. The state has treated slum life as a housing problem. It is a housing and livelihoods problem together. You cannot solve one and ignore the other.
This is why many of the families who do receive units end up renting them out to people who already have a stable income, and moving back into informal settlements to continue the businesses that keep them alive. The housing might be affordable to build. But they are not affordable to live in, not for the people it was meant for.
That single pattern says something the government has not been willing to admit: affordable housing, as it currently stands, is built for those who already have income. It is not built for those who need income first.
If the state wants housing policy that actually serves slum residents, it has to start with livelihoods, not structures. Income security has to come before or alongside housing, not after it. Otherwise the programme will keep producing the same outcome: ghost buildings that stand empty of the people they were named for, and communities pushed back into the same informal existence the programme promised to replace.
The question is not whether Nairobi can build affordable housing. We have many old Nairobi estates to prove that it can. The question is who that housing is actually for.
It’s too unfortunate that the government doesn’t consider the low income earners,all they want is make life unbearable for them.we need accountability of all this process.
This housing projects is a total mess
The so called Affordable Housing Programme is negatively affecting people in informal settlements and small businesses. Instead of protecting low-income families and their livelihoods it risks disrupting businesses displacing people and increasing the cost of survival. Housing was presented as affordable but it is not free as many people were made to believe. If ordinary Kenyans still have to pay for these houses while losing their businesses and livelihoods then the government must explain who this programme is actually affordable for.
Mpango huo unaoitwa wa Nyumba za Bei Nafuu unaathiri vibaya watu wanaoishi katika makazi yasiyo rasmi pamoja na wafanyabiashara wadogo. Badala ya kulinda familia za kipato cha chini na maisha yao, una hatari ya kuvuruga biashara, kuwahamisha watu na kuongeza gharama ya maisha. Nyumba ziliwasilishwa kuwa za bei nafuu, lakini si za bure kama watu wengi walivyoaminishwa. Ikiwa Wakenya wa kawaida bado wanapaswa kulipia nyumba hizi huku wakipoteza biashara na riziki zao, basi serikali inapaswa kueleza mpango huu wa nyumba za bei nafuu kwa kweli ni wa bei nafuu kwa nani.
The very day that very same common mwananchi when was once told to refer at the back of their national identity card is when trust vanished ever since. Nevertheless not bringing the citizens together on the matter at the table to be addressed fast rather implemented it without citizen participation hence expecting support from the same people whom they bypassed 🙈 itakuwa ngumu
The very day that very same common mwananchi when was once told to refer at the back of their national identity card is when trust vanished ever since. Nevertheless not bringing the citizens together on the matter at the table to be addressed fast rather implemented it without citizen participation hence expecting support from the same people whom they bypassed 🙈 itakuwa ngumu
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