Development Workshop has undertaken the Environmental Risk Assessment project in a pilot district in peri-urban Luanda. This is the first project of its type in Angola, applying geographic information systems (GIS) tools in an urban / peri-urban area of Angola. The project was initiated in the second quarter of 1998 and was planned to be executed in two phases. The first phase was extended from 15 to 21 months and is complete at the present time. The second phase overlaps with the present project and integrates it into a major three year Sustainable Urban Services Project funded by the British Department for International Development (DFID) as a monitoring component.

The overcrowded peri-urban slums of Luanda (where over two-thirds of the population of Angola now lives) are clearly unhealthy places to live. However, very little information on environmental health is available which might be used to plan rehabilitation programmes, and whatever information there is tends to be dispersed, inaccessible and difficult to use. This proposal is for the development of a database, and a Geographical Information System, of appropriate environmental health indicators for a significant, representative area of peri-urban Luanda. This is the first phase of a programme to develop national capacity to collect and use data, through GIS, on environmental health that can assist in the planning of national reconstruction.

In July 1997 Development Workshop carried out a study on scavenging activities in the city of Luanda. The study was performed to gather concrete and accurate information on scavenging activities and to dispel misconceptions. No previous studies of this nature are known. The objective of the study was to identify which items are being scavenged, who is scavenging and under what circumstances, where scavenging is occurring, and what is the life-cycle of the scavenged items. With this information one could a) assess possibilities of reducing the volume of household waste through enhanced removal of the scavenged items; b) create jobs in the informal market; and c) provide information to assess the potential for future project interventions.

The 2005 Development Workshop Scavenger Study was conducted in August of 2005 and set out to examine whether scavenging still occurs in urban Luanda and on its periphery. While illustrating that scavenging activities have shifted to the periphery of the city, this report will also analyze the positions of ELISAL, urban waste management, VIDRUL, as well as multinational and domestic beverage manufacturers in terms of sustainable waste management as it relates to recycling. The trajectory of recycling has been altered since DW’s 1997 Scavenger Study. The death of UNITA’s rebel leader in 2002 effectively ended Angola’s civil war. This has resulted in Luanda’s economy to be able to receive commerce and global flows, in this process many partnerships within recycling have been formed within the informal and formal sector. This 2005 diagnostic study will also detail the process of recycling in the informal sector and formal sector.

This report documents the five aspects of poverty in Luanda and the way in which they vary spatially and interact in Luanda. Remote sensing was used to identify settlement typologies with similar physical and socio-economic characteristics for the City of Luanda in order to be able to generalize about the status of each of the five indicators in each typology. All areas of Luanda were mapped into different zones based on satellite images and informants who are familiar with the urban environment of the city were then requested to identify and categorize each type of development. Field research was carried out for each of the five indicators in the form of household surveys, focus group discussions with local people and government representatives and field observations. Different types of field research was conducted for each indicator. Information on access to water and basic services, housing quality and location and the number of people per household was collected by carrying out a household survey of more than 700 households in Luanda. Household surveys were carried out in each of the nine typologies and the sample took into account the number of households in each of these typologies.