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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Innovative milieus
“My real education was working in the slums“
Finding ways out of poverty
Energy efficiency for Rio de Janeiro
Split households
12/2004
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Finding ways out of poverty
[ By Tillmann Elliesen ]
In the yard in front of the house, Ibrahim Yaya’s wife prepares the evening meal on an open fire. Ibrahim’s youngest grandson makes himself comfortable on his grandmother’s lap. “This place used to be a haunt of crooks and kids running gambling operations. The garbage was piled a metre high,” Ibrahim Yaya says. Through the narrow alley leading to his house, the sound of traffic can be heard from the main road. A young woman who rents space in Ibrahim’s home stands holding a hose, filling an old oil drum with water that will be sold to the neighbours. Ibrahim enjoys the luxury of running water. He shoos away goats and poultry, before offering his old friend James Sarpei and the journalist visiting from Germany seats on the bench by the wall: “Welcome to Nima.”
Acute poverty is not only a rural phenomenon in Ghana; it is also found in the cities. The first impression the capital Accra makes on visitors is misleading. Only a four-lane road seperates the smart district of Kanda, with its foreign embassies, chic villas and the old seat of government, from the city’s biggest slum, Nima-Maamobi. And anyone who strolls along the extension of the bank-studded High Street in the south of the city will suddenly find himself in Ga Mashie, Accra’s erstwhile commercial hub and dockland – an area in sharp decline since the port was closed and relocated forty years ago.
Sarpei played a major role in making urban poverty an issue in Ghana. Together with fellow students, the now 57-year-old launched “Operation Help Nima” in 1968. This campaign aimed at drawing attention to the appalling conditions in the area and supporting residents do something about the squalor in which they lived.
Even today, Nima retains the character of a collection of villages in the heart of the city. It is shaped by immigrants, who came to the Gold Coast from all over West Africa to seek their fortunes after the Second World War. Neighbourhoods are still characterised by ethnic lines. There are enclaves of Ivorians, Burkinans, Nigerians, Guineans. “The problem was that many thought they would return home at some point, so nobody took care of the neighborhood,” recalls Ibrahim Yaya, who arrived here with his parents in 1958.
In the late 1960s, when James Sarpei came to Nima, the district was a patchwork of ethnic communities, which had little contact with one another and no contact at all with the world beyond the boundaries of Nima. Most of the then 50,000 residents eked out a living as day labourers; poverty was acute, sanitary conditions appalling. Nima was choking on garbage. When the rains came, the tracks between the houses – made ever-narrower by uncontrolled sprawl – turned into mud-baths.
“The military government of the time wanted to bulldoze the district completely and rebuild it from scratch. Fortunately they didn’t have the money,” James Sarpei says. Together with his fellow students, Sarpei encouraged the traditional leaders in Nima to get together and discuss ways in which the district’s problems could be alleviated. At the same time, they got the city council and government to listen to what the leaders had to say. The strategy worked out. In the early 1980s, after more than ten years of lobbying, the government officially approved of the redevelopment concept put forward by Operation Help Nima. As well as improving sanitary facilities, the goal was to open up the dense development of the district with paved squares and roads, which would not become impassable each time it rained, to create space for public life. The housing shortage was to be relieved by multi-storey development.
Twenty years on, the situation in Nima remains difficult. Some major roads have been improved, but the district is still criss-crossed with open drains flowing into a slow-moving ten-metre-wide stream of faeces and garbage which cuts across Nima from east to west. There are still far too few sanitary facilities. “It is depressing to see the long queues form every morning outside the public toilets,” says Imoru Baba Issa, who – like his father before him – is chief of his community. The physical landscape is also pretty much unchanged. The multi-storey buildings designed for Nima in the 1970s by urban planners from Darmstadt Technical University still exist only as prototypes – without any follow-up. Since then, the population has tripled: Nima’s two square kilometres are the home of 150,000 people. “There used to be five of us,” Baba Issa says, standing in the yard of his house. “We extended the building a bit but we now number 22 people sharing five rooms.“ Water supply, however, is much better than in the past. Many homes now have large plastic storage tanks.
The most important change that has occurred in Nima is in its residents. They are more self-confident and they are better educated. Some new private schools bear witness to the fact that the average income has risen. People are now better off. Ibrahim Yaya’s seven sons and daughters have all completed senior secondary education. His eldest son is a journalist, until recently with Ghanaian television, and one of his daughters works for an airline – jobs that Ibrahim himself could only dream of.
The traditional leaders in Nima have developed a political awareness that extends far beyond their communities. “Without direct contact with the government, we can achieve nothing,” says Chief Baba Issa. But the politicisation has a down side. Unlike in the days of military rule, power and political influence in democratic Ghana are decided by party membership. “The neighbourhood meetings where problems in the district are discussed used to be a lot more productive,” Ibrahim Yaya complains. “Now they are basically party political events.”
James Sarpei contributed to raising a generation who are proud of their district. But what of those coming after the Ibrahim Yayas and Baba Issas who responded to James Sarpei’s campaign? “It is not easy to keep hauling the young people out of their lethargy and find new spokespersons to make Nima strong,” Sarpei says. The ten to fourteen-year-olds at the Islamic Studies Center – a school with both a religious and secular curriculum set up with money from Saudi Arabia – have no intention of playing any such role. There are simply too many problems in Nima, they say. They all want to move away. Where to? Preferably America, England or Germany.
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