Harare Slum Upgrading Project - this is a 5-year project focusing on the upgrading of informal settlements. The project is being jointly implemented by Dialogue on Shelter, Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and City of Harare and is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the tune of US$5million. The Harare Slum Upgrading Project is part of the Global Programme for Inclusive Municipal Governance (GPIMG) which also includes other cities like Luanda in Angola, Monrovia in Liberia, Cairo in Egypt, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and Lilongwe in Malawi. Under the Harare project, the alliance of Dialogue on Shelter and the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation will spearhead data collection processes in the form of profiles, household enumerations and mapping of informal settlements in an around Harare. The rationale for this exercise is to document these informal settlements and link the data relating to these areas with City’s cadastral maps and development plans. A total of 37 slum settlements were profiled and mapped in year one while in year two, 31 slums were profiled. After the data collection, the Harare project, will implement a housing densification pilot in Dzivarasekwa Extension which will accommodate 16 families and provide infrastructural services for 480 families from the settlement. Dzivarasekwa Extension families were involved in developing three architectural designs through community consultations and exchange visits to areas where housing units have been constructed using a similar densification concept. The actual superstructure construction and infrastructure installation will be conducted by the community whilst the City of Harare and Dialogue on Shelter will provide the technical support. Besides developing housing, the pilot also undertook a process of identifying and documenting current challenges relating to housing delivery faced by the poor. This exercise has assisted the Harare partners together with other stakeholders to reflect and revisit the systems, practices and regulations that hinder the delivery of low-income housing at a scale that addresses the existing delivery gap. Consequently, a report on the review of housing regulations was compiled and adopted by Harare Council and this should provide the basis for institutionalizing the recommendations.
Sanitation and Hygiene Applied Research for Equity (SHARE) Project - the main focus of the SHARE project is to build city-wide sanitation strategies using a bottom-up process that is anchored on profiles, enumerations and mapping of water and sanitation infrastructure. In Zimbabwe, the SHARE project is being undertaken in Chinhoyi, the provincial capital of Mashonaland West province. The 3-year project, which is being funded by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) is also being implemented in three other cities namely Dar-Esc-Salaam in Tanzania, Kitwe in Zambia and Lilongwe in Malawi. The SHARE project has been inspired by the challenges related to conventional approaches to urban sanitation and year 1 seeks to document these experiences through a situational analysis. Year 2 focuses on precedent-setting pilots while the final year targets the initiation of city-wide strategies.Chinhoyi Federation has already implemented alternative water and sanitation systems on a site allocated by Chinhoyi Municipality accommodating 244 families. Ecological sanitation units and boreholes are currently servicing the families in the absence of reticulated infrastructure. The SHARE project therefore provides an opportunity to reflect on the experiences gained so far and also explore possibilities for scaling up. To date, the SHARE partners (Dialogue on Shelter, Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and Chinhoyi Municipality have since undertaken stakeholder identification and a meeting bringing together organizations dealing with water and sanitation issues in Chinhoyi was held in May 2012. Meanwhile, community-led profiling and mapping of the water and sanitation infrastructure in selected settlements in and around Chinhoyi is underway.
Women’s Property and Inheritance Rights - the project seeks to conduct a participatory baseline analysis of women’s experiences in relation to access to property and inheritance rights in three provinces of Harare, Bulawayo and Mashonaland West. In particular, the ‘Women’s Property and Inheritance Rights’ (WPIR) project aims to address property-related challenges faced by women in the context of HIV/AIDS and this will be accomplished through designing community-based education campaigns to raise awareness among the Federation membership and the wider community. The WPIR project also targets at the establishment of grassroots para-legal structures that are immediately available and accessible to communities that require such support. The project is being implemented with support from Legal Resources Foundation, Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP) and PaDare - Men’s Forum on Gender. Legal Resources Foundation was engaged on training community-level para-legal resource persons whilst PaDare - Men’s Forum on Gender and CCJP and were involved in sensitization and profiling meetings. The latter, have been used to trigger discussions within communities and confront women’s rights issues a topic that has for a long time been perceived as sensitive and hence very ‘disruptive’ to the family unit. To date, the WPIR project has managed to establish the para-legal structures in areas like Crowborough North in Harare and Chinhoyi in Mashonaland West. Besides, communities from the project areas have also participated in horizontal peer-to-peer learning and this has strengthened their capacity to deal with the women’s rights problems that they face as individuals and collectively as the entire community.