It’s the day after a storm in Kampala, Uganda, and in the low-lying district of Namuwongo that means flooded houses, children playing in water from an overflowing sewer and sludgy, slippery ground that makes it nearly impossible to walk.



Fruit seller Nana Kabogere, 33, was born here and lives here. Her small home is colourful and welcoming, the walls covered in religious posters, family photographs and her children’s drawings. This is all Kabogere knows – but she also knows she has had enough.

“Water goes up to my waist during the rainy season. That’s why our main ambition is to leave this place and have land of our own,” she says. Kabogere has been evicted five times from settlements in the area, which is, quite rightly, considered unsafe by government agencies. But the problem is that no feasible alternatives are provided: the new homes that are built to replace the slums are too expensive for people like Kabogere.

So she hit upon an idea: buy land with others. In 2011, Kabogere and six other women began a co-operative in order to save money, making and selling bricks and briquettes from recycled material (in addition to their day jobs). Their housing co-operative now has 30 members. “Many of us are married, and our husbands thought this was a joke,” says Amina Iddi, a samosa seller and co-operative member. “They just want to earn their own money quickly and keep it for themselves,” she says. But when the women were able to use some of the money they saved to build three new toilets, and a local TV crew came to film them, things changed. “They take us very seriously now,” she laughs.

Nana Kabogere outside her house in Namuwongo. ‘Our main ambition is to leave this place and have and of our own,’ she says. Photograph: Darlyne Komukama

Co-operatives were once very powerful in Uganda. Farmers would buy land together, work on it communally and share the proceeds. But the regime of Idi Amin saw it as a threat, and in the 1970s and 80s there was a crack down. Today, the registration process is very complicated and a housing co-operative needs 30 members to become official. Managing them is a logistical nightmare. Keeping 30 slum-dwellers together long enough – most need at least five years to be able to afford save enough to buy a plot of land – is hard in informal communities, where financial insecurity and evictions mean people move around a lot.

But co-operative societies are nevertheless making a comeback – there are nearly 16,500 registered in Uganda. These are mainly savings and credit groups, but as with the Namuwongo group, increasingly they are entering into joint business ventures with a view to banding together to buy land. For the cash poor in Kampala, where there is a chronic lack of affordable housing, this is an attractive option, despite its challenges.

The government is also coming round to the idea of housing co-ops: they were included in the national housing policy launched at the end of last year, and many are hopeful the new co-operative society bill going through parliament will make the registration process easier.

A makeshift house in Namuwongo. The government plans to replace slums with formal housing, which is likely to remain unaffordable for the majority of the population. Photograph: Darlyne Komukama

The city’s record on affordable housing isn’t strong. Namuwongo is a fairly typical case. It was once almost entirely made up of informal settlements, but a government “slum upgrading” project in the 1990s demolished much of it – and the recent floods are simply a spur to more demolition. “In order to restore some areas as green spaces and deal with the flooding problems, people who have settled in wetlands have had to be evicted,” says Robert Kyukyu, manager for strategy at Kampala Capital City Authority.

But, although the flooding means the area is not suitable for living in, the city’s solution – building formal housing in place of slums – doesn’t seem to work either. It is a common trend in Kampala: so-called “affordable housing” developments are built to replace settlements, but in reality most people cannot afford to live in them. So they sell their rights to the land and find informal accommodation elsewhere. “These new places were not meant for poor people like us,” says Iddi, who has lived in Namuwongo for 30 years.

The new developments are normally built by the National Housing and Construction Corporation, which was once a government agency tasked with housing public servants and people on low incomes. In the 1990s, however, the body was part-privatised, with half its shares bought by none other than Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Today, it is essentially a private developer that builds estates that are sold to landlords who then rent them to the middle classes. But last year the Ugandan government announced plans to regain full ownership of National Housing, which could present an opportunity for change.

Bahati Kisenyi with the savings book belonging to members of the co-operative. Photograph: Darlyne Komukama

For now though, says Dorothy Baziwe of local NGO Shelter and Settlements Alternatives, “these projects don’t serve the people they are meant to serve”. She says very few organisations in Uganda, or the international donors that fund them, are interested in tackling Kampala’s affordable housing problem. “World over, housing is really a private good,” she says. “It’s looked at as a private responsibility. But here, there are people who simply cannot afford it.”

Those people feel, by and large, that Kampala is no longer their city. Although glitzy malls, grand hotels and imposing office blocks are proliferating, street sellers are being removed from the streets and informal settlements – particularly in central, commercially viable areas – are being demolished.

Kisenyi slum in central Kampala is one such settlement. Conditions range from decent to dire, and it is popular with refugees, poorer Kampalans and rural migrants. “It is near the market, near the town and near the hospitals. There are better houses outside the city but the transport coming to town everyday is too expensive,” explains Bahati Shellinah, 53, who has been in Kisenyi for 30 years. But she says that evictions in the area have become so regular over the past few years that nearly everyone is preparing – or should be preparing – for life after Kisenyi.

‘We are strong and will make a lot of money’: members of the Namuwongo housing co-op are confident they will soon be able to buy their own land. Photograph: Darlyne Komukama

Shellinah has been a member of a housing co-operative that previously had plans to try to buy land in Kisenyi. She thinks the model is good in principle, but the process was slow and eventually her group fell apart when, ironically, evictions meant members needed to take back their savings. “You cannot plan for anybody, everybody plans for themselves. I have some land in my village about 20 miles from Kampala. I plan to put up a banana plantation, and there is a small house there that needs renovation so at least I can sleep there,” Shellinah says. And what of those who don’t have a village to go back to? “They will have to sleep on the street.”

About 20 miles from central Kampala, some former Kisenyi residents are living in a housing co-operative in Wakiso region. The area is quiet and feels distinctly suburban, as do the small, neat houses where the members live, each with two bedrooms, a living room, a tap and electricity. Chairperson Betty Nakafero said that eviction after eviction began to take its toll on her – she is HIV positive and found it hard to stay healthy in Kisenyi’s harsh living conditions. So, in 2007 she turned to her support group for women with HIV. “We tried to find ways to make money as a group. Every Tuesday we would make things like baskets and scarves together and on Fridays we would sell.” After huge problems registering, four years later they became a co-operative.

Some dropped out along the way. “People left. They’d say, ‘This is a dream … I have saved for a full year and seen nothing!’” explains Henry, another member. But the Wakiso group were able to get land faster than expected thanks to a loan from Shelter and Settlements Alternatives in 2014, which they pay back in monthly instalments (and is then fed back to other housing co-operatives). Each member pays 1m Ugandan shillings upfront (£220) and if they are able to eventually pay off the full cost of their housing unit, ownership transfers from the charity to them.

While this co-operative society was particularly lucky, it does stand as an example of one way it can be done. There is a feeling within this group that their success is in part due to their shared experience as people affected by HIV: “You need to be with people who have the same motivations. Here, we are one,” says Nakafero.

Back in Namuwongo, Maria Ajok, a member of the aspiring housing co-op, braids the hair of one of the other women. “Raising the money and getting people together takes time, so the government should find groups that are already saving and help them to buy land faster,” she says. What are their chances of saving enough money to buy themselves secure housing? “I am confident in our group. We are strong and will make a lot of money. It won’t be long before we can buy land together.”

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