Tanzania Profiling Exchange Report
Collecting information about urban poor populations has not been a serious, systematic priority of national governments or cities throughout the developing world. Such censuses, when undertaken, are often conducted in frequencies too sparse to accurately track the rapid growth of slum areas or informal settlements. Often by the time the data is analyzed and made available to the public and city governments, it is already outdated and its usefulness as a planning tool diminished. Of even greater concern is the total exclusion of many informal settlements from the city’s planning agenda. Their tenuous relationship with local authorities makes them invisible to infrastructure plans. This is exacerbated by spiraling costs, which makes retrofitting very expensive. The end result is that high costs are used to justify why cities fail to install water, sewerage and drainage facilities or plan land use for slum areas.The SDI rituals of settlement profiling and community led enumeration have long been utilized by slum dweller communities to provide an up-to-date, accurate on the ground account of conditions in these slum areas. In order to achieve this SDI has continued to urge strong member affiliates to support upcoming affiliates attain set milestones. In the month of May the Kenyan affiliate had the opportunity to support its East African Counterpart, Tanzania build its profiling capacities.