Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

74 PLANET OF SLUMS
fallen well short of expectation and only 9 percent of recipients
belonged to low-income groups."! !
The balance sheet of first-generation World Bank urban projects in
Africa reveals equally bleak or perverse results. In Dar-es-Salaam after
the end of an ambitious World Bank intervention (1974-81), a study
found that "a majority of squatters allocated plots in the sites and
service program have sold their plots and gone back to squat on virgin
land on the periphery of the urban areas." Most of the site-and-service
lots ended up in the hands of state employees and the middle class.!2
Planning expert Charles Choguill says this is unsurprising because the
minimum savings required by the World Bank to qualify for a construction
loan was so high that it automatically excluded most of the
squatters.13 Likewise, in another site-and-service scheme in Lusaka,
only one fifth went to the target group, and roughly the same dismal
result obtained in Dakar.!4
Writing in 1993, the ILO's A. Oberai concluded that World Bank
slum-upgrading and sites-and-services projects had largely failed to have
visible impact on the housing crisis in the Third World: "Despite efforts
to make projects replicable, the project approach ties up excessive
resources and institutional effort in a few locations and has not been
able to achieve the desired level of housing stock. The project approach
is therefore unlikely to have a significant impact on solving the problem
of shelter in most developing countries."!5 Other critics pointed to the
programmatic disassociation of housing provision from employment
creation, and the inevitable tendency for sites-and-services schemes to
be located in peripheries poorly served, if at all, by public transport.!6
11 Greg O'Hare, Dina Abbott, and Michael Barke, "A Review of Slum Housing
Policies in Mumbai," Cities 15:4 (1998), p. 279.
12 A. Mosa, "Squatter and Slum Settlements in Tanzania," in Aldrich and Sandhu,
Housing the Urban Poor, p. 346; John Campbell, "World Bank Urban Shelter Projects in
East Africa," in Amis and Lloyd, Housing Afn·ca 's Urban Poor, p. 211.
13 Charles Choguill, "The Future of Planned Urban Development in the Third
World," in Aldrich and Sandhu, Housing the Urban POOt; p. 408.
14 Campbell, "World Bank Urban Shelter Projects in East Africa," HousingAfrica's
Urban Poor, p. 211; Richard Stren, "Urban Housing in Africa," ibid, p. 41.
15 Oberai, Population Growth, Employment and Poverry in Third-World Mega-Cities, p. 122
16 "Livelihood and Shelter Have To Be Seen as One Rather than Separate
Entities," in Kalpana Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stoties from Asia's Largest Slum, New
Delhi 2000, p. 202.
ILLUSIONS OF SELF-HELP 75
Yet the Bank continued to press its incrementalist approach - now
refurbished and renamed "whole-sector housing development" - as the
best strategy to ameliorate slum conditions.
Soft Imperialism
Since the mid-1990s the World Bank, the United Nations Development
Program, and other aid institutions have increasingly bypassed or
short-circuited governments to work directly with regional and neigh­
borhood non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Indeed, the NGO
revolution - there are now tens of thousands in Third World cities -
has reshaped the landscape of urban development aid in much the
same way that the War on Poverty in the 1960s transformed relations
between Washington, big city political machines, and insurgent inner­
city constituenciesY As the intermediary role of the state has declined,
the big international institutions have acquired their own grassroots
presence through dependent NGOs in thousands of slums and poor
urban communities. Typically, an international lender-donor like the - '
\Vorld Bank, the UK Department for International Development, the
Ford Foundation, or the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation will work
through a major NGO which, in turn, provides expertise to a local
NGO or indigenous recipient. This tiered system of coordination and
funding is usually portrayed as the last word in "empowerment,"
"synergy," and "participatory governance."
On the World Bank side, the increased role of NGOs corresponded
to the reorientati n of Bank objectives under the presidency of James
Wolfensohn, the Australian-born financier and philanthropist whose
decade in office began in June 1995. Wolfensohn, according to biographer
Sebastian Mallaby, arrived in Washington as a self-proclaimed
world-fixer, "seeking to revive the messianic energy of McNamara's
Bank" by making poverty reduction and "partnership" the new centerpieces
of his agenda. Third World governments were required to
involve NGOs and advocacy groups in the preparation of the Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) that the Bank now required as proof
that aid would actually reach target groups. In a cooptive McNamaran
17 Datta and Jones, "Preface," p. xviii.