IDRC Communications A longstanding IDRC grantee combines satellite observations with old-fashioned grassroots data gathering to measure the impact of Angola’s rapidly growing slums on the environment.

Since 2002, when decades of civil conflict ended, Angola has struggled to rebuild. Its planners are hampered, however, by a shortage of reliable data about their own country’s population and environment. During the long conflict, Angola’s cities mushroomed when the rural economy collapsed and many parts of the countryside became unsafe. An influx of poor people settled in the urban districts they could afford — that is, in slums that are vulnerable to flooding or erosion, and that lack
basic services and economic opportunities. Poverty, in other words, has a spatial aspect and a circular effect. The poor are likely to settle in environmentally sensitive areas where their presence is likely to exacerbate environmental damage, thus aggravating their poverty.

If Angolan policymakers were to take effective measures to tackle urban destitution and environmental degradation, they needed a clear picture of the geographic distribution of slum dwellers and of their social and environmental circumstances.

Development Workshop Angola An ambitious IDRC-funded research project, aimed primarily at documenting the environmental impact of encroaching slums, has been painting this picture. The study was conducted from 2009 to 2011 by

Development Workshop Angola (DW Angola), a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Luanda.DW Angola is the oldest NGO in the country. Since 1981 it has worked closely with government and with local community groups to provide basic services to Angola’s impoverished and war-ravaged people. IDRC has supported seven major initiatives the organization has conducted. DW Angola was co-founded and is directed by architect and urban planner Allan Cain, a Canadian who has lived in Angola almost 40 years (and who is Canada’s honorary consul there). Cain has been made an officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of his humanitarian work.

Angola experienced a massive shift of populations from the war-torn interior to the coastal settlements during the conflict years. Displaced families built their housing in unoccupied unserviced peripheral land around the existing towns. Low cost land was typically in the most environmentally vulnerable locations adjacent to coastal marshes or in river basins that have in recent years become increasingly susceptible to flooding. Most population shifts occurred in the civil-war years from 1974 through to the ceasefire in 2002 —years that coincide with increasing concern about global climate change. It
was also in 1974 that the colonial power abandoned Angola and closed down over 500 meteorological
and hydrological tracking stations leaving the country without means to track its
increasing vulnerability.