POVERTY AND INFRASTRUCTURE ACCESS IN SLUMS

## **Employment: a welfare gap in Nairobi but not in Dakar**

Regarding the employment status of adults in the two cities, interestingly, Dakar’s poor and nonpoor are not very different. In Nairobi’s slums, however, poor adults are less likely to be employed than their nonpoor neighbors. The same finding holds when we look at employment within households. Taken together with education levels, this suggests that while adults in nonpoor slum households are likely to have better educations than those in poor households in both cities, only in Nairobi does this systematically correlate with their chances of being employed (appendix tables 12–13).

## **Decent living conditions: the poor lag behind the nonpoor in Nairobi but not in Dakar**

As noted in our discussion of cross-city analysis, we created a summary indicator for tabulating access to basic or decent living conditions—the percentage of households that have access to both piped water and electricity and are constructed with permanent external walls. We then examined whether this indicator differs systematically among poor and nonpoor households.

In Dakar’s slums, there is no statistically significant difference between poor and nonpoor households on this composite proxy indicator. By contrast, in Nairobi’s slums, poor households are systematically (statistically significant at 1 percent level) worse off compared with their nonpoor counterparts. In Nairobi (but not in Dakar), living conditions—defined in terms of access to basic utility services and housing—vary systematically with the relative economic or welfare level of a slum household. Whether such variation in utility services is purely due to demand-side/affordability differences or due to neighborhood-level supply bottlenecks is something that we further explore in the next section (Section 4). In the next two subsections, we examine quality of living conditions—and, especially, infrastructure access—in more detail.

# The living conditions diamond: dwelling quality and tenure

## **Housing units: the poor are more cramped and, in Nairobi, their house quality is worse**

As earlier noted, while the overall conditions of housing units remain dismal in both cities, we do find systematic differences in the condition of housing units occupied by poor and nonpoor households (appendix tables 14.1–14.2). For example, poor households are likely to live in more crowded conditions with the mean number of persons per room in Nairobi being 3.0 for poor households and 1.6 for nonpoor households; the corresponding figures in Dakar are 2.9 and 2.3 respectively. Regarding materials (permanent versus less permanent) used for the walls, roofs, and floors of the housing units, there is not much of a difference between poor and nonpoor households in Dakar’s slums. In Nairobi’s slums, however, the nonpoor are more likely to live in housing units built with permanent materials than their poor neighbors are.

## **Tenure: more a city-level problem rather than a poverty issue?**

Poor and nonpoor households in Nairobi’s slums have similar levels of land/structure ownership and tenancy rates. The turnover rate for the two groups does not differ much either—both poor and nonpoor households in Nairobi’s slums have lived in their slums, on average, for similar lengths of time.

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