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Drawing on project experiences over a thirty-year period and academic literature, this paper focuses on the question: what has worked in slum upgrading in Africa? We find that efforts to regularize land titles to confer de jure security of tenure have not been encouraging. By contrast, infrastructure investment efforts have performed better—they have conferred de facto security of tenure and also ameliorated living conditions. Over time project-based learning and microlevel innovations have helped improve upgrading performance. To create broader and sustainable benefits, however, upgrading needs to go to scale. We propose an upgrading strategy with the following elements—a programmatic approach that links slums to citywide systems, is channelled through government, and combines a community-demand and participation approach with supply-side constraints and rules of access.

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Compared with the non-poor, just how inadequately are the urban poor served by the public utilities and private water providers? Based on a survey of 674 households, this paper examines current water use and unit costs in three Kenyan towns and also tests the willingness of the unconnected to pay for piped water or improved kiosk service. By examining the water use behaviour of poor and non-poor households, this study brings into question a long-standing notion in the literature-that only the poor are underserved, use little water and pay a lot for it. It also indicates that the standard prescription to 'price water and create water markets' is in itself insufficient to improve service delivery and that kiosks are not always a good solution for serving the poor.