Category: Informal Economy

  • Database of schools in Mathare

    Spatial Collective has been gathering information on schools in Mathare Constituency since January 2018. At the time of writing, we have collected information on hundreds of indicators for about one hundred schools in all six wards of Mathare, including Mathare North area. The information collected included the following categories: Information on the interviewer School description…

  • Survey of 6000+ plots in Viwandani (Photo Blog)

    In the past six weeks, Spatial Collective’s team visited approximately 6000 plots in Viwandani Area in Nairobi and completed thousands of interviews touching on access to sanitation facilities. To complete a project this size in such a short time, project planning and good teamwork are essential. Images below represent one of our fieldwork planning meetings…

  • Creating landlord and plot profiles of Viwandani Area

    Spatial Collective is currently conducting a door-to-door survey for the purpose of collecting data on sanitation facilities and creating landlord and plot profiles in one of Nairobi’s informal settlements. We are providing the manpower to conduct the survey and have also trained additional people from the settlement to help with the work. To fulfill the…

  • Project Planning (Video)

    Project planning is essential for successful implementation of activities. Get it right and the project runs like a well-oiled machine. Mess it up, and the outputs of the project could be jeopardized. We recently held a project planning meeting in Mathare and thought to make a video. The aim of this particular project was to collect…

  • PopTech Talk

    I was recently honored by being selected as a 2015 PopTech Social-Innovation Fellow. I had the pleasure to participate in a week long training program with eight other amazing fellows, organized on the beautiful island of North Haven, in Maine. The training program was led by a variety of astonishing faculty and it consisted of…

  • Geography of Service Delivery

    Nairobi’s population has increased more than tenfold in the last 50 years.[1] This rapid urbanization brought with it a two-tier development process where some areas are rapidly modernizing while others lag behind. The provision of basic services often follows the split. Different geographic areas of Nairobi enjoy different levels of development and access to public…

  • Rethinking waste management in Nairobi’s informal settlements

    Community-based organizations are in the forefront of dealing with waste management in Nairobi’s informal settlements, however, their interventions often fall short of becoming sustainable and profitable on the long run. Research shows that there is ample opportunity in alternative material recovery, recycling, and sorting of trash in the informal settlements, as well as, in establishing…

  • Mathare Demographic

    This post was cross-posted from Spatial Collective’s blog. Informal settlements are often missing from geographic and statistical representation of their countries, and Nairobi’s informal settlements are no exception. With so few household surveys, high-quality data with specific focus on informal settlements are very hard to come by.  For this reason, little information is available on…

  • Waste Management Stakeholder Survey

    This post was cross-posted from Spatial Collective’s blog. In March and April 2014, following the household survey, Spatial Collective continued their research into informal waste management activities and other community-led hazard mitigation practices in Mathare. The focus of the research was on various groups and individuals dealing with environmental and waste management in the four wards…