Last week there were forced evictions and demolitions in Korail, the large slum opposite the HQ of the huge non-governmental organization BRAC, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. People have been left without shelter, water or food and many had no advance warning. Apparently schools are among the buildings demolished and, unsurprisingly, amid the disruption, children have missed school and exams. Two children are said to have been killed when their house was destroyed. BRAC staff give their perspectives here and here, and an official reaction here.

There was peaceful demonstration on the day following the evictions. “Without relocation, slum will not disappear,” the signs said, “Don’t destroy schools, mosques, and madrassas.” (source)

Korail is one of the areas I studied in 2008 and 2009. It was not the worst slum I saw in terms of either living conditions, poverty or education. It gets severely flooded in the rainy season and access to water, toilets and cooking facilities was limited. But it was also – as these researchers who lived there for several months comment – a vibrant place with some sense of community. As they also say, resettlement schemes rarely help the urban poor. Urban low-income groups are the engine of the city's (and the country's) economy, but are criminalized every time they seek shelter or basic services. These demolitions highlight the lack of a humane and coherent policy.

Mini-app

Here is an interactive version of the chart that was in the research agenda I posted earlier.



(Needs a fairly up to date version of Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer. If it doesn't work well try viewing it on a separate page. Let me know if there are any bugs)

"My home my own way"

Interesting video made by architecture students at BRAC University, Bangladesh as part of a collaboration with ClimUrb, a research project at the University of Manchester. The students worked with residents of a low-income settlement to design resilient and low-cost housing. Ultimately, though, no new housing was built. But clearly the students learned a lot about the lives of the residents ('We even spent a night there!'), and some went on to build low-income housing elsewhere.

My Home My Own Way from BWPI on Vimeo.

A research agenda

Although there is huge variation in the lives of people who are poor and live in cities around the world (not to mention the difficulties in defining who these people are), I think there are enough common threads to make education and urban poverty a meaningful research topic. In this draft research agenda I try and describe those common threads, explain why urban poverty is increasingly important, and list what I see as some of the most pressing questions. In brief:

1. What can we say with existing data? Do household surveys like DHS and MICS cover the urban poor, including marginalized groups like those who live in slums and recent migrants? To some extent we can check this by triangulating with other sources, like specific slum surveys.
2. What access do the urban poor have to education, and what are the barriers? This is fairly obvious but important to answer carefully. Relying on household surveys with limited coverage of marginalized groups may not tell us much.
3. Is education a path out of poverty? Cities may be centres of economic opportunities, but can the urban poor avail of these, with or without an education?
4. What happens inside schools? Are urban poor children stigmatized by their backgrounds? Or supported and treated equally?
5. What type of provision? NGOs often step in where government school provision fails, tailoring their services to the circumstances, such as timetables that allow for children's work. But where are the models of NGO programmes that coordinate well with government services, avoid being cast as second-rate education for the poor, and help young people find better jobs afterwards?

Inevitably this is a very partial list and biased by my own experience and background. I'd love to hear what other people see as the most pressing questions. Respond below or get in touch to write your own post.

Earlier

My earlier work on slums in Bangladesh is here and here, or this poster gives a quick summary.

(PDF version)

Introducing

Poverty is increasingly urban, and among the urban poor are some of the most disadvantaged in society: people who live in slums, migrants and displaced people, and street children. Urban poverty in developing countries is rising on aid and research agendas, but there is still an information crisis when it comes to the barriers to education for these groups.

As part of my fellowship (research proposal) at the Unicef Innocenti Research Centre, I will be posting to this blog regularly (time permitting). The plan is a combination of survey data analysis and some new qualitative fieldwork. I want to see what existing household surveys can tell us about education amongst the urban poor, and to try and explore whether they are even covering slum households. The new fieldwork, in Bangladesh during April-June 2012, will explore ways that children living in slums are helped or hindered within schools by their relationships with teachers and other students.

The aim is for this to be both a research resource and a place for news and debate on urban poverty and education. I would welcome collaboration – please contact me if you're interested in posting.