Announcing SDI Annual Report 2014 – 2015

We are pleased to announce the 2014 – 2015 SDI Annual Report!

The Shack / Slum Dwellers International (SDI) network of 33 national affiliates is organised into four regional hubs: The Asian Hub, The East African Hub, The Southern African Hub, and The West African Hub. There is also an emerging Hub in Latin America. Organising the federations into hubs allows for the building of regional alliances of the urban poor that engage in joint learning, planning and advocacy. In this year’s annual report, our progress from the year will be presented by Hub, so the reader can understand the progress being made in each region of the network.

Each hub report captures the health and energy of each of the urban poor federations within the hub and indicates the progression through organising and mobilizing, the building and networking of savings groups, the profiling and enumeration of settlements and cities, and the negotiation, planning and implementation of upgrading projects in partnership with local authorities. This is a cyclical and overlapping process, but for the purpose of this report we present this process in three stages:

  • Know Your Federation, where we understand the health of federations, their membership, their geographic scope, and their savings
  • Know Your City, where we explore the information federations gather on the settlements and cities in which they live, and
  • Improve Your City, where we understand how the organising and information gathering translates into improvements and upgrading of informal settlements. Each hub report captures the health and energy of all the urban poor federations within the hub

The presentation of the report in this fashion will help readers to understand the work and practice of the SDI network more deeply. It will also make readers familiar with the structure of our new website (to be launched soon), organised under these three headings, which presents unprecedented levels of access to information on federations, slum settlements, and federation projects. We hope this will serve as a valuable resource to all those interested in the future of cities in the Global South.

To read the full report, click here.