Charity Mumbi is planning officer at Muungano wa Wanavijiji’s technical support NGO, SDI Kenya. Together with colleagues she been contributing, through the Kenyan Ministry of Health’s Covid-19 task force to the development of government guidelines for home-based care and isolation centers.

About community isolation centres or areas

Isolation at home will not work in informal settlements. When we asked Muungano communities about their priorities, they prompted us to start thinking about spaces/areas to be used for isolation, because most communities are generally overcrowded and do not have access to health facilities.

Community isolation centres or areas can be a partial solution. But, often little reliable spatial information is available about informal settlements that could support work to identify them. Drawing on our extensive settlement profiling, the Muungano Alliance has produced maps proposing places which might be re-purposed to become dedicated Covid 19 isolation centres or areas. These are in or near informal settlements where we already have spatial profiling information and planning data.

The maps have been produced with the aim to inform the Kenyan government’s Covid-19 task team, but we are also making them available here for download and use. They propose possible areas to isolate people suspected of having been infected with coronavirus, as well as the ownership status of these areas and suggested timeframes of operation.

Why are we advocating isolation centres?

Isolation at home, one of the recommendations for preventing the spread of coronavirus, is almost impossible to put into practice in informal settlements. This makes it likely that the virus will spread rapidly.

One reason is that self-quarantining – staying at home for at least 14 days – is scarcely an option for low income residents of informal settlements. They rely on daily income from working in the informal economy, for example from casual labour or selling vegetables, or from low paid jobs in the formal economy such as domestic workers and guards. They have very few savings. There is every likelihood they will have to carry on working.

Another reason is that population density is extremely high, inside and outside the home.

Inside the home, in informal settlements in Kenya and across the Global South it is common for families of 2–5 people to live in a single 3x4 metre room in a shack or tenement block, with a single tap and pit latrine toilet shared between many families.

Outside the room, shack or tenement, there is little public space. The average population density of ‘slums’ in Nairobi, Kenya, was 28,200 people per square kilometre in 2009, a 51% increase in just ten years. Mukuru – one of Nairobi’s largest most high-density informal settlements – has a population density of 108,128 people per square kilometre (PDF).