It's been over 7 years since the Jubilee Party of Kenya set out the ambitious Big Four Agenda to address affordable housing, affordable healthcare, food security, and manufacturing. As part of this ambitious plan, the City of Nairobi aimed to deliver 1 million housing units by 2022, with that number later being lowered to 500,000 to make the goal more attainable.
But now, all these years later and more than halfway to the Big Four deadline of 2030, barely 9,000 units have been built. The government has done little to address the shortfall or to rebuild the confidence of Kenyan citizens that they can accomplish the task. At the same time, residents of informal settlements are being evicted en masse to make way for new development, sometimes tens of thousands of people at a time.
Fredrik and Leilani meet with Pauline Vata, founder, and lead lawyer at Pauline Vata & Associates Advocates, an expert in public policy advocacy, and former Executive Director of Kenyan human rights organization Hakijamii, to talk about informal settlement evictions, the importance of comprehensive domestic law in realizing the right to housing, and how more Kenyans are becoming empowered to fight for adequate housing.
To learn more about Pauline's work, check her out on Twitter @VataPauline.