UPDATED Coronavirus response: possible isolation areas – maps

UPDATED 02 June 2020
We now have maps (below) for the following cities/settlements: Nairobi (settlements of Mathare, Huruma, Mukuru, Kibera and Kawangware, and the neighbourhood of Eastleigh), Kisumu, Mombasa.

Community isolation centres or areas

Isolation at home will not work in informal settlements. When we asked Muungano communities about their priorities, they prompted us to start thinking about spaces/areas to be used for isolation, because most communities do not have access to health facilities and are generally crowded.

Community isolation centres or areas can be one partial solution. But often little reliable spatial information is available about informal settlements. Drawing on our extensive settlement profiling, the Muungano Alliance has produced maps proposing areas which might be considered and re-purposed as dedicated Covid 19 isolation centres or areas – in or near informal settlements where we have collected spatial or planning data.

The maps here have been mainly produced with the aim to inform Kenya’s government-led COVID 19 Task team, but we are also making available here for download and use. They propose possible areas for use to isolate people suspected of having been infected with coronavirus, as well as the ownership status of these areas and suggested timeframes of operation.

Please credit Muungano wa Wanavijiji Alliance/SDI Kenya and if possible provide a link to muungano.net.

Why are we doing this?

Isolation at home, one of the recommendations for preventing the spread of coronavirus, is almost impossible to put into practice in informal settlements. This makes it likely that the virus will spread rapidly.

One reason is that self-quarantining – staying at home for at least 14 days – is scarcely an option for low income residents of informal settlements. They rely on daily income from working in the informal economy, for example from casual labour or selling vegetables, or from low paid jobs in the formal economy such as domestic workers and guards. They have very few savings. There is every likelihood they will have to carry on working.

Another reason is that population density is extremely high, inside and outside the home.

Inside the home, in informal settlements in Kenya and across the Global South it is common for families of 2–5 people to live in a single 3x4 metre room in a shack or tenement block, with a single tap and pit latrine toilet shared between many families.

Outside the room, shack or tenement, there is little public space. The average population density of ‘slums’ in Nairobi, Kenya, was 28,200 people per square kilometre in 2009, a 51% increase in just ten years. Mukuru – one of Nairobi’s largest most high-density informal settlements – has a population density of 108,128 people per square kilometre (PDF).

Click on the thumbnails to view and download high res versions

2020-05-08_0936 v.png — Kawangware timeframe

Mathare timeframe.png — Mathare timeframe

Mathare ownership.png — Mathare ownership

Coronavirus dataMuungano Alliance3 June 2020Planning, Mapping, Health, Coronavirus1 Comment