For me there were obvious similarities to Dharavi in Mumbai and the vast recycling operations there, but there were also huge differences.  This was a “city” behind walls on rutted roads packed with trucks moving precariously in and out piled high with giant filled bags of recycled items.  This was  the  community equivalent of a factory floor, where the workers lived along inside and on top of their work space.

We were guided by Laila Iskander, who is a developmental consultant, but a hugely exuberant and determined woman, with a long relationship in building a non-profit, the Association for the Protection of the Environment, which created a sophisticated recycling and processing operation to support education and training programs in Muqattam Village.  Knowing something about recycling from our own efforts in Dharavi with ACORN International, I was very impressed on several levels.  First, they had invested in the machinery and capacity to make their own pellets and to firmly plant themselves in the competitive heart of the recycling and resale market, employing scores of people.  Their schools were designed without apology in the most concrete terms to train people to do a better job as recyclers.  There was no liberalism here.  They taught people how to read the street signs on their pickup route.  They taught people how to add the weights to get a fair price.  They had also managed to get donations of textile remnants and trained young women to sew marketable items as part of what she called “development tourism,” which was a fascinating concept in and of itself.  They ran a store profitably.  Iskander was also frank that the Association was successful because they had connected to rich Egyptians within the Coptic community in Cairo and globally to produce the income they needed to operate.  She described a fundraiser a rich, woman in New York City did for them every year around Christmas time where they sold their products, producing one-third of their annual income.  She was a ball of fire and had built an amazing organization, even if it was so one-off as to be both dramatically important and clearly nothing that could be easily replicated or sustained by others.

What was the same were the issues of globalization forced fed to Cairo municipal policies by the IMF regardless of the local culture.  Less than 10 years ago Cairo moved from a system that had one of the highest recyclable rates in the world (85%+) based on the zabaleen business model to one that focused on trucks and centralized pickup, contract bidding, and the creation of the first landfills in the Cairo area.  They campaigned aggressively against the contracts that had been awarded to replace them with routes and trucks and gone directly to the clients to continue to provide door-to-door collection.  Their system was thriving because it was culturally appropriate, despite the fact that the zabaleen clients were paying double, partially as an extra charge on their utility bills for the new, ineffective compact truck and pickup system and also directly to the zabaleen.  By successfully organizing the market the zabaleen had survived and thrived, but the compact trucks reduced recycling because everything was pushed together.  Furthermore, rejecting the advice of the zabaleen, the outside contractors tried to get a German system with four separations, which people would not do, rather than just organic and non-organic.  The community seemed to be busy and thriving.  Each ton of recycling provided 9 jobs.  One of our delegation asked Leila about whether any of the young women had gone from the school to higher education, and she answered that “No, and she would kill them if they did!”  After 30 years working on the project and training them in these livelihoods, she and the NGO were focused on sustainability and financial self-sufficiency for the family, not some exceptional circumstance of escape.  Like I said, there were no liberals on this tour!

Another reason that waste management has deteriorated significantly could have been a classic story of unintended consequences or an act of brute oppression where “what goes around, comes around.”  The Coptic community is a minority in Cairo, roughly 10% in the dominant Muslim city.  The community raised pigs on the organic waste, and then ate them, which was a great solution to both situations since Muslims cannot eat pork.  During the swine flu epidemic, Mubarak ordered all of the pigs in the country killed, and special forces came into the area, did the job, and then buried them under line in huge pits elsewhere.  Now here was a problem though in many areas of Cairo though these many years later, since the zabaleen only collect what they believe they can sell.  They can’t sell organic waste or eat the pigs that no longer exist, so organic waste piles up all over the cities and swells the landfills as well.

The bottom line is not huge riches for anyone involved.  The guess was that a recycler makes about 1200 Egyptian pounds per month or about $200 USD or about $6.50 per day, which is better than Dharavi, though certainly not a princely income, is also a long way up from precarious poverty.  The Organizers’ Forum delegation had a masters’ course in organizing and development with the zabaleen.

The only thing that did not ring true was the response to a question about the communities plan, where the answer claimed that the community wanted to relocate the sorting and processing to another location in order to separate the work more from the residence.  More commonly communities demand, just as they do in Dharavi, that they live as close as possible to their work, reducing costs and separation for the families.  I would bet the monthly wage, there is little real support for any relocation, but we will have to see what the future brings for the zabaleen.

New Orleans

Colleagues working in Dharavi, the mega-slum in central Mumbai where ACORN International organizes and has several projects, wrote an eviscerating piece today (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01srivastava.html?ref=todayspaper)  that somehow found its way onto the op-ed pages of the New York Times about another one of these bright light ideas, this one being promoted by the Harvard Business Review of all places to claim concern for the poor.  Seems the Review launched a competition to build a one-room $300 house that they claimed “could improve the lives of millions of urban poor around the world.”  The arrogance and ignorance of the poor and their living conditions is startling, and Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava of the Institute of Urbanology can hardly control their contempt though they do a masterful job at it in their piece, so hats off to them.

“The $300 house could potentially be a success story, if it was understood as a straightforward business proposal instead of a social solution.  Places like refugee camps, where many people need shelter for short period, could use such cheap, well built units.  A market for them could perhaps be created in rural-urban fringes that are less built up.   The $300 house responds to our misconceptions more than to real needs.  A better approach would be to help residents build better, safer homes for themselves.  The $300 house will fail as a social intiative because the dynamic needs, interests and aspirations of millions of people who live in places like Dharavi have been overlooked.  This kind of mistake is all too common in the trendy field of social entrepreneurship.  While businessman and professors applaud the $300 house, the urban poor are silent, busy building a future for themselves.”

The authors were actually kinder than they might have been here while trying to be diplomatic.  The urban poor relocation projects in Delhi that have specialized in slum removal and replanting of the poor to the far outskirts of the city at the outer edge of transportation and livelihoods have been a disaster.  Certainly the space provided is in the 150 meter  floor plan that would be similar to the $300 house, but the results have been disastrous.

Even in disaster relief it is hard not to remember the Andres Duany and New Urbanist schemes for “Katrina Cottages” as not simply temporary housing replacements for trailers, but preferable and permanent housing structures in New Orleans.  Duany is a great architect and planner and no doubt a man of good will, but such a notion was DOA from the start.  Supposedly some have been built and used in Mississippi, and they might end up as storage sheds and mother-in-law cottages on some back lots, but as replacement housing in New Orleans, the signature touches that were supposed to recall the city and its distinctive architecture was charades at best.

Businessmen, developers, and promoters understand how to make a fast buck and that’s easily proven but we shouldn’t be confused when they are hypnotized by the glare of a $424 billion market for affordable homes that they know anything about the poor, care anything about poverty relief, or have any interest in understanding either.

New Orleans

A website called “Blogging Innovation,” is worth sharing in that regard to give folks a better context of what is being said and accomplished (I’ve highlighted the nice props Vyoma Kapur, the author of this piece gives to ACORN International.):

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Mumbai’s Innovation Hub

by Vyoma Kapur

Innovation in the developing world, as many people may tend to think, comes from either large conglomerates or small entrepreneurial communities which have had the good fortune of venture backing. Especially in a free market economy, such as India’s, innovation is often thought of as the mandate of thriving businesses equipped with the know-how.

In Mumbai, India’s economic powerhouse, the real social innovation is coming from the grassroots. These are people, who despite having little, are the answer to Mumbai’s mounting waste management problem.

The dwellers of the Dharavi slum, the largest in Asia, have created a massive recycling industry. Invaluable for the social impact it has created, the slum’s existence is supported by high-strung officials and ordinary civilians alike. Using simple machines in their home factories, these dwellers are recycling anything from plastic bottles and metal cans to paper and cotton, saving the city from the wrath of its own garbage. Over 80% of the plastic waste of Mumbai is recycled in the Dharavi slum.

As the consumerism of Mumbai’s upper and middle classes disposes of thousands of tons of waste material everyday, energetic young men of Dharavi sift through piles of trash to gather anything with the potential of being recycled. Different types of junk is given a new life and then sold for a bargain. With support from non-profit organizations such as ACORN International, rag-pickers are taught how to manage solid dry waste.

With an increasing number of micro-entrepreneurs entering the recycling business, this industry has seen an astonishing level of organic growth. The slum produces a jaw-dropping $1.3 billion worth of recycled output every year. There are approximately 400 recycling units, and the number is increasing every month.

Spreading across approximately 174 hectares, this slum is like any other. It lacks food and proper sanitation and is rife with squalor. For a few hours everyday, some areas of the slum are supplied water and electricity. Despite making only a fraction of the salaries earned by their counterparts in more developed areas of Mumbai, many of these dwellers are finally finding their way out of poverty through the huge demand for their services. Needless to say, environmentalists are in full praise of this green industry, a rarity in the hustling cites of India.

Having spent a few years in India, I find this commendable. I have not seen the Dharavi slum, however; I’ve seen many other slums, just like those depicted in Slumdog Millionaire. That slum dwellers could become social entrepreneurs within their own capacity to fight for survival never crossed my mind.

The Dharavi example made me wonder; do we always need a team of experts and comprehensive research data to innovate? Is it not about solving the problems in front of us and seeking ways to improve what is defined and traditional? To the Dharavi dwellers, the waste piled up around their homes was not a problem, it was an opportunity. They became rag-pickers and set up mini factories with whatever little they had. In time, they turned Dharavi from being Mumbai’s biggest headache to one of its greatest assets, setting an example for similar communities around the world.

New Orleans

In Vancouver a young activists, Ajay Puri at the Citizen Wealth event the other night briefed me on their activities throughout the area with great enthusiasm.  Luckily, I was not caught totally off guard because ACORN India’s union of ragpickers had also agreed to join participate in the 350 actions from Dharavi in Mumbai.

And, did so in fine form!   ‘Dharavi ragpickers seek recognition‘

Once you click on the link you will see 350 spelled out on the banner in plastic pieces that our members recently recycled and can read Vinod Shetty’s (ACORN India’s director in Mumbai) comments on all of this as well.

The same action and banner was also caught on video in Dharavi itself on this piece:   Dharavi’s Day of Action against Global Warming

Just a small example of Community Organizations International / ACORN International doing our part in this important effort, and this doesn’t even count all of the “Live Green” work we are doing through ACORN Canada in Toronto!

Mumbai

I was the 100^th person to sign the attendance list, so I could tell immediately that in every way this year’s event was going to show real progress in the growth of the organization.  The seats were already up and filled, where last year I had been part of the setup crew for a smaller gathering.  Before I left we had almost 200 on the attendance list.

The ACORN ragpickers and their families had a lot to celebrate.  The announcement that Vinod Shetty, ACORN’s director in Mumbai, had sent out was straightforward:

ACORN  will be launching the waste matters program in Lonavala and Khandala municipal limits. In Mumbai we have launched the waste matters program in schools (in partnership with CMCA and Lions club, Juhu) ,by the year end our ragpickers will be picking up waste from 22 schools, (this will give  our members a  source of income and at the same time educate the school students in waste management).

This was a good toehold, now we were getting ready to pick up the pace, it seemed.

The biggest difference this year was the obvious signs that we had moved from an initiative to an organization.  The ACORN India membership committee were clearly running this event and were swarming everywhere with their proud badges as they ushered folks to chairs and hustled about.  Various committee members acted as the MC’s for the program, handling the microphone like seasoned pros.  Last year Vinod had to do all of these pieces, but Anil, our community organizer was everywhere behind the committee, and Vinod was in the back of the room, watchful.

This was also an ACORN program.  Kids did dancing exhibitions to Bollywood favorites, and they were good!  A guest whistled the tune to three well known pop hits, and the crowd loved it.  The committee thanks everyone and the guests.

These are all small steps in building a strong organization in this huge mega-slum, but important steps giving all of us much to celebrate as ACORN India builds its base in Mumbai.