The Philippines is a microcosm of the problem, with children driven to the streets by crushing poverty.

Worldfocus correspondent Mark Litke and producer Ara Ayer report from the Philippines, where they encounter one man — a former child of the streets himself named Joe Dean Sola — who has dedicated himself to improving the lives of street kids.

Since the story was shot, street children have suffered even more as the result of the severe flooding in the region.

(View full post to see video)‘

For more on Worldfocus’ coverage of the Philippines, click here.

Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera, is largely populated by Nubians. Photo: Flickr user MothersFightingForOthers

Nubians in Kenya are one of the groups that Worldfocus is exploring on our extended coverage project Stateless to Statehood.

Adam Hussein Adam, project coordinator of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, writes how his community’s plight is largely unknown outside of Kenya.

Kenyan Nubians have been defined as stateless people because their identity is questioned. They are without doubt one of the country’s most invisible and under-represented communities – economically, socially, politically and culturally. This is because they have been silent victims of discrimination, exclusion and violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms for as long as they have been in Kenya…

My great-grandfather worked in the service of the British in Somalia around the First World War and later resettled in Meru, a small town on the slopes of Mt. Kenya. His father before him worked for the Turko-Egyptian army in the Sudan. I, like my parents, was born in western Kenya.

Although I am well-educated, I have experienced serious difficulties in interacting with government officials. Between 1992 and 2000, I applied unsuccessfully for a passport five times, losing jobs in the process. One manager once asked me why I did not have a recognisable ethnic identity and that this was why I could not be promoted. Apart from studying to university level, which is an exception rather than the rule, mine may as well be the story of most Nubians. It is a story characterized by the need to survive through challenges that are never explained to you. It is a story characterised by limited interactions with state officials who always remind you it is your privilege to be served by them. It is a story characterised by assuming false identities in order to belong…

Before I encountered these challenges in my own life and found out that many of my Nubian colleagues gave up hope of productive careers because of delayed or denied identity cards, I had accused most of them of being lazy. Today I understand that Kenyan Nubians, whether citizens or not, do not belong.

The Kenyan government uses both ethnicity and territory to establish belonging. Since both Nubian ethnicity and their territory of occupancy are contested by the government, most Nubians live as de facto stateless persons without adequate protection under national and international law, irrespective of the fact that they should be considered Kenyan citizens under the Constitution. In Kenya nothing defines your citizenship more than your ethnicity. Nubians face institutionalised discrimination in issuance of documents. They are subjected to a vetting process of ethnic determination in order to acquire an identity card or passports.

Kenya today does not have official figures of Nubians and does not include them in census reports. There is no official recognition of the community; the Kenyan government had classified the community as ‘other Kenyans’ or just ‘others’ and has only recently started a process of recording Nubians as a named clan of other Kenyans.

Above all, Nubians live in temporary structures throughout Kenya and often on contested lands. Most Nubians’ settlements do not have title deeds and are only occupied on a Temporary Occupational Licence (TOL), leaving the present generation of Nubians as mere squatters.

Stateless individuals and communities like the Nubians are assumed to be hopeless and helpless victims, dependent upon the goodwill of others. Under the assumption that citizenship is the only vehicle for having a civic and political voice and that therefore stateless people lack any political identity, stateless people become less than fully human and are reduced to mere targets of humanitarian assistance. All energies are thus focused on how to acquire citizenship for stateless people as fast and as easily as possible.

What are the Nubians’ issues?

Obstacles to citizenship are also faced by other minority groups in Kenya such as Kenyan Somalis and Coastal Arabs although the Nubians have experienced some progress. The real progress in Nubian experience is in their adaptation and mastery of living in Kenya without belonging…

In 2003 the then Chairperson of the Kenyan Nubians’ Council, the late Yunis Ali, encouraged a procession of Nubians marching to Kenya’s High Court thus:

“My people! For a century, we have sought a compassionate hearing from all authorities in Kenya but we got none. Today, we march to the Kenyan High Court for justice – if not to get it, then as testimony that we stood up for our rights.”

In the end, the challenge of standing up to statelessness – or any human rights abuse – is that as a victim you see it through the emotional lenses of feelings and experience; others will then judge you as subjective. When you stand apart and subject the issue to objective criteria, legal definitions limit one’s expression; most of the legal terms are not expressive enough for local realities. For Kenyan Nubians the lack of a link to the state, lack of integration and lack of social acceptance have been part of our existence. We are neither Sudanese nor accepted as Kenyans.

As a statelessness advocate, I believe that legal links are important for anyone belonging in contemporary society; however, without addressing the social acceptability of any community of a people, groups like the Nubians will continue to live from one crisis to another.

The original article was published in Forced Migration Review, 2009. No. 32.

The year 2007 was a turning point for the world, marking the first time when the majority of the global population lived in cities rather than in the country.

The world’s population is expected to surpass 9 billion by 2050, and increasing urbanization will push the urban-rural divide even further.

Do the world’s cities have the jobs, infrastructure and space to support this kind of growth? The answer might be found in the explosion of world slums over the past decade. The United Nations predicts that 2 billion people worldwide will live in slums by 2030.

In his 2006 book “Planet of Slums,” urban historian Mike Davis paints a dark picture of the future to come, writing:

The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay.

Worldfocus.org’s weekly radio show explored urbanization and the rise of slums, examining how such deplorable conditions might be addressed, even as the global economic crisis looms.

Worldfocus anchor Martin Savidge hosted a panel of guests.

Erhard Berner is an associate professor of developmental sociology at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. He has done extensive research on urban poverty and community responses in the Philippines and elsewhere and served as a consultant to UN-Habitat, NGOs, and government institutions.

Robert Neuwirth spent two years living in shantytowns across the developing world to write “Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World.” He is now at work on a book chronicling the global reach of the informal economy.

Mary Wiltenburg is an independent reporter, now following a year in the life of a refugee family in the U.S. and Tanzania in a series called Little Bill Clinton, a real-time multimedia project with The Christian Science Monitor and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Worldfocus producer Ara Ayer is in Manila and sends in this report of the conditions he’s witnessing:

 

Below, view a slideshow of life in five major world slums.

Credits:
Host: Martin Savidge
Producers: Bijan Rezvani, Nicole E. Foster and Katie Combs

Dhobi Ghat in Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi neighborhood, where most of the workers belong to the Dhobi (washermen) caste. Photo: Ben Piven

Multimedia reporter Ben Piven spent nine months researching and documenting for Caste in the City [PDF] on a Fulbright grant. He recalls his field research and the questions surrounding caste and Indian nationalism in the slums of Mumbai. Ben is currently completing his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University.

Watch Worldfocus’ signature videos on Dalits in India.

The peppery aroma of snack carts permeated the humid air. Workmen gathered under a corrugated tin overhang to sip on mango lassis and sweet lime juice.

At the end of a long day of interviews in the scorching April sun, I was finishing up my fieldwork inside a predominantly Dalit slum called Ramabai Colony in eastern Mumbai. A passerby stopped to ask why I was conducting research on the relevance of caste in contemporary Mumbai.

“What is your caste?” he asked me in Hindi.

“We don’t have caste in America,” I responded abruptly. “America is different from India.”

I then paused for a few seconds, quickly becoming pensive. After 15 grueling interviews, I was not keen on explaining the nuances of American social stratification in my choppy Hindi.

On other days when I was in more edifying moods, I explained class distinctions in the U.S. and how the religion of my birth did not differentiate along caste lines. When folks demanded to know, I sometimes joked that I was a Hindu of the Hebrew caste.

To many ordinary Indian people, caste is a universal. Humans in every country must belong to a caste, they suppose. How could any society function otherwise? Some sanitation workers even believe that their filthy profession is predestined.

Across India’s biggest city, thousands of leather workers, washermen and rag pickers ply the same trade as their ancestors. But many of their children have become bureaucrats, factory workers and merchants. Dalits are members of the lowest rung of traditional Hindu society, and they are increasingly asserting their political and economic rights.

To be sure, the enigma of caste is not entirely unique to India. Yet its omnipresence on the subcontinent makes it as quintessentially Indian as curry, Gandhi, and the head wiggle.

Even so, some Indians place national unity far above caste. In front of the Bombay Stock Exchange - arguably the most important symbol of India’s 21st century prosperity - I interviewed a bank watchman named Yogesh Kumar Singh. A young migrant from poor, rural Uttar Pradesh in north India, he simply could not identify his own caste.

In a proud defense of his caste ignorance, he declared, “All castes are the same. We’re all basically just Indian.”

Singh turned toward the crowd of people who were observing the interview and said triumphantly, “The caste divide doesn’t matter because we’re all brothers.”

- Ben Piven

The young stars of the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire.”

Danny Boyle’s feel-good love story “Slumdog Millionaire” won eight Oscars Sunday night, including Best Picture and Best Director. Set in Mumbai, India, the film tells the story of 18-year old Jamal Malik, an orphan from the slums, who wins big on the Indian version of the show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”

While celebrated internationally, the movie has faced criticism in India. Slum-dwellers in Mumbai, where the movie was shot, have protested the word “dog” in the title. Others in India have criticized “Slumdog” because its depiction of Mumbai focuses entirely on poverty.

Journalist John Elliot describes the celebrations of “Slumdog” around Mumbai, as well as its wider reception in India:

As I write, reporters and commentators on every India tv news channel are tumbling over themselves in an ecstasy of superlatives as they try to match the success with words. Television sets are on all over India, including in Dharavi and Garibnagar (see pic), whipping up a mood of national celebration that is usually reserved for cricket victories against Pakistan…

Perhaps inevitably, Slumdog has been widely criticised in India because the flip side of all the success is a national unwillingness to accept anything that is even slightly negative or critical (as I have often discovered on this blog). So both the words slum and dog have been attacked, as has the portrayal of the uglier side of Indian life.

Blogger “Lekhni” believes this criticism stems from the discomfort that middle-class Indians feel towards “the other” India:

I wonder if our main objection to the movie is because it depicts a part of India we’d rather not focus on.  We’d like to celebrate our economic growth and our resurgent middle class.  We’d like to point to our new malls and glass-fronted buildings.   The movie does not show much of the prosperity of middle class India.  It shows the other India that not many of us know very well, or would like to think about - the poor India that has remained poor despite all the recent economic growth.

A blogger of “Voice from a 2.5 World Country“ disagrees, arguing that poverty remains the enduring, but increasingly inaccurate, image of India:

This is the only India the world knows about, and that as anybody living in this country who has a functioning pair of eyes, ears and nose, knows about. How many times in a millisecond must we be reminded that this is India ‘too’? How many times? In fact, this is so ingrained into the Westerner’s psyche, that when my American friends came to India to visit, their first question to me coming out of the airport driving into the city was: ‘We feel let down. Where are all the poor people?’. Because shock of shocks, there is some part of India which does not look like Dharavi.

Blogger Juan Cole finds fault in the film’s focus, not on poverty, but on the crime in Mumbai slums:

That the film depicts an one-dimensional view of the poorer areas of Bombay is undeniable. There are Fagins and pimps, gangsters and corrupt building contractors, courtesans and orphans. But poor neighborhoods in India are a dense thicket of social and economic networks, with a working class, shopkeepers, peddlers, and other responsible if poor citizens toiling to eke out an honest living. The film eschews the urban working class for an unrealistic focus solely on the criminal element. Extortion rackets exist. But they prey on small restaurants and shops. If there were no honest workers or businesses, there would be no way to extract protection money.

Foreign Policy magazine has compiled a photo essay “India’s Real-World Slumdogs,” featuring the thriving businesses in the slums of Mumbai.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user KaushiK™ under a Creative Commons license.