What is the name of your solution?
Ikhayalami
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
When risks are looming and when disasters strike, we step up and work with communities to make their homes and settlements safe.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
One of the greatest challenges for climate change adaptation is how to build resilience for urban dwellers who live in informal settlements. These settlements have been built outside the ‘formal’ system of laws and regulations that are designed to enhance safety, security and good health. This enormous problem is growing exponentially. There are currently more than 1 billion urban citizens in the world who live in informal housing with 80 per cent attributed to three regions: South- Eastern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. An estimated 3 billion people will require adequate and affordable housing by 2050. In sub-Saharan Africa, where urbanization is rising steeply the number of shack dwellers is set to rise six-fold from 370 million to a staggering 1,5 billion. New urban districts will continue to mushroom everywhere, even in the Global North, taking the shape of informal settlements, often constructed in an ad-hoc way using cheap available materials with no formal spatial planning and no health, flood or fire safety measures. Informal settlements have astronomically high levels of risk - from inadequate and overburdened infrastructure and services such as waste collection, water and sanitation systems, roads and unplanned urban sprawl. These combine to produce massive threats to slum populations from infectious and parasitic diseases to floods, pollution and runaway fires. These threats will rise in tandem with the rise in the earth’s temperature. Fires in the city of Cape Town provide a clear example. The city recorded 2835 shack fires in 2019/2020 and 5807 in 2020/ 2021 – a 40% increase. It is this challenge of shack fires and floods and their dramatic increase that constitute the primary problem that we hope to help communities address. We will do so by finding technical solutions to the deplorable material quality of many shacks. These physical conditions make them flood and fire prone. We simultaneously focus on their haphazard layout which often turns an otherwise isolated crisis into a climate induced disaster. Indeed, even the IPCC in its Fifth Assessment Report (2014) recognized that upgrading informal settlements has relevance to climate change adaptation, but there was little emphasis on community centered design and implementation. Where there have been upgrading programs, the focus has been on urban infrastructure and services and not on making affordable improvements to shacks as a first step towards a formal house. Our approach is applicable as a proactive response but we have chosen to focus our response on disasters like fires that have already destroyed shacks and devastated communities. Meaningful community participation is key in both proactive and reactive circumstances. In situations of risk and extreme crisis there is a tendency for external actors to infantilize victims and make critical decisions on their behalf. Top-down approaches which leave decisions to outsiders have the knock-on effect of disempowering local communities. A profound opportunity is therefore lost. This is a failure to invest adequately in local level capabilities so that communities can better understand climate risks and co-create their own resilience.
What is your solution?
Ikhayalami’s branding strapline is “rather an affordable decent shack today than wait for a formal house that will probably never arrive.” Our solution lies in working with communities to upgrade their informal settlements in ways that make them more resilient – especially in relation to disasters such as floods and fires. We consider it the role of the State, even in low-income countries, to provide basic services and infrastructure while it is the role of the households and communities, operating in an enabling environment, to reconfigure their settlements and build their own houses in line with what they can afford or with state support in the form of subsidized shelter.
We enable community-centered upgrading to happen by facilitating detailed and in-depth processes of spatial reconfiguration - otherwise known as re-blocking. This is a social technology that generates community cohesion while it produces human scale settlement design. This upgrading process has opened low carbon development pathways in that reconfiguration generally ensures that upgrading takes place in dense clusters of housing with densities able to support high levels of public transport, walking and cycling.
We expedite the shack upgrading process with a shelter upgrade typology that we have designed to meet the following criteria: Our building typology is affordable (currently $1200), is easy to transport, to erect (and dismantle), are socially acceptable and that are fire and flood resistant. We do this together with on-site training of community members in the construction of decent, upgraded, and upgradable shacks.
The shack upgrading process has also enabled us to apply our minds to low or zero carbon construction. At present we use a high-quality durable zinc material coated with fire retardant. It is much more environmentally friendly than cement, a component of concrete that is usually made with energy-intensive clinker. Moreover, natural aggregate sand and gravel can become scarce in certain locations and their depletion is destroying landscapes. With our current product we are able to address climate adaptation as the primary response. Neutral carbon housing has been a secondary response. We have an designed an excellent shelter typology that we have used for years and that could be used by other disaster response agencies worldwide. However we are committed to conduct research and search for carbon neutral materials that meet our criteria indicated above. At present carbon neutral materials are either perceived as inferior and or are not affordable and they are not socially acceptable. Much promising research has been done in South Africa, by a government agency, in using invasive alien wood chips treated with fire retardant resin for this purpose. We are, exploring the introduction and adaptation of these bio-based construction materials as a means to achieve a climate neutral building stock. But until any carbon neutral material meets all our criteria we will continue using our low carbon prototype that includes materials that are easily sourced globally so that it is easier to roll out the response.
Simultaneously we plan to invest in the organisational capacity and the broad-based community participation in community organising and in the production and distribution of the material and the finished product.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We are working to improve the lives of very poor urban and peri-urban households living in informal settlements and facing significant risks which are amplified by climate change. Our direct impact is in the informal settlements of Cape Town, the city in which we are based, and where over 200,000 households live in inadequately serviced shacks. Our social methodology and technical innovations are, however, sufficiently standardized to be replicated internationally. In Cape Town and beyond, the population whom we target, lives in settlements that are outside the formal systems of regulations such as recording land tenure and getting permission to erect or upgrade the structures in which they live. Many live on land that is illegally occupied on sites at high risk from flooding and landslides, chosen by residents because they are unsafe and unsuitable for formal development. Their living conditions elevate risk from most climate change impacts such as heat waves, heavy storms, floods, higher wind speeds that fan fires, sea-level rise, unpredictable water availability and infectious and parasitic diseases. What is more, most of these households receive, at best, only basic infrastructure, and services. They lack safe, potable water, decent sanitation, paved roads and paths, stormwater and surface drains and connection to electricity grids and they often live in flimsy, flammable structures without adequate insulation or ventilation. While no one is excluded we try to prioritize women and children because when disasters strike, they become even more vulnerable as better connected, better resourced and more powerful men in the communities tend to drive upgrading solutions in ways that ignore and undermine their needs. In the majority of cases these settlements are not upgraded with funding from government and only those who can afford market solutions can improve their living conditions. Our solution addresses their needs by providing a) technical offerings in the form of improved design of structures and settlements, b) the construction or upgrading of environmentally appropriate, risk-reducing shacks and c) by enabling community participation in step-by-step, incremental, and therefore more affordable upgrading processes. These offerings apply as much to proactive interventions as they do to post disaster responses, although the latter consistently take preference. In our response we take at-risk or affected households on a transformational journey from poor quality or severely damaged shack, to an immediate but decent emergency response, to the upgrading and improvement of the shack structure and where possible to the incremental construction of a formal house. We recognize the many positive aspects of informal settlements, and we work with the inhabitants to achieve these goals. The aim is to ensure good quality buildings on safe sites with basic but good quality infrastructure and services. These are the foundations for much reduced risk and greater resilience to extreme weather and the pervasive threats of “slum” life as a whole.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Ikhayalami has a very close working relationship with a local community based social movement, Sikhona Nathi, with active membership in scores of informal settlements in Cape Town. Our office and our small factory are in the heart of the city’s shacklands and double-up as the networking hub for our social movement ally. It is the venue for weekly meetings between leaders of the two organisations and representatives of the communities in which construction planning or implementation are taking place. Out of these dialogues and the actual construction processes that follow, Ikhayalami has developed a wide range of leadership mentoring processes among men and women from shack communities. These men and women began their journey by taking initiatives within their own settlements but because of the network structure of Sikhona Nathi they engage other communities and share their experiences, successes and failures and begin a process of assisting these other settlements to organize. Many development organisations seek to produce things that help address the problems people facebecause of their poverty. These can be material things like houses, or more safely configured settlements, or they can be non-physical things, like knowledge of rights, or improved skills. This ‘delivery’ approach can be profoundly disempowering for communities. Given the emphasis on ‘producing outputs’ and its implicit quantitative measures of efficiency, addressing the problems of poverty is seen as a job for technically skilled, specialised professionals. Designing and building shelter, reblocking settlements and installing infrastructure, are presented as products people need, not things they necessarily need to know how to do. An alternative to ‘delivery’ is ‘process’. Ikhayalami adheres to this principle and has sought to conceptualize and implement something we believe is missing from conventional ‘delivery’ paradigms. We have found it in unleashing and building the accumulated knowledge, skills, and practices of the poor themselves. Because of this focus on developing sustainable and replicable community-based processes, Ikhayalami and Sikhona Nathi function as an alliance rather than as a patron-client, strictly delivery-oriented relationship. Each of the Alliance partners brings different skills and talents to the process, and together their resources are diverse but inrtconnected enough to provide what the communities need. Ikhayalami provides knowledge and capacities in formal systems of management, including fund-raising and financial management. It also provides professional capacities in documentation, advocacy, technical oversight and the understanding of policy, rules and regulations. Sikhona Nathi provides direct and immediate links to households in the communities where they have a presence and to whom they are accountable. They identify households or settlements at risk of victims of disaster and iKhayalami then provides external assessment and vetting capacity. Both organisations are always present when settlements are re-designed, when every individual shack is upgraded, at every negotiation with community members, the authorities and other stakeholders. The two entities apply their different capacities in ways that enhance the value each one brings to every intervention. In addition to operating together at project and community level these two organisations work together to internally monitor and evaluate their work.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Support informal communities in upgrading to more resilient housing, including financing, design, and low-carbon materials or energy sources.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Cape Town, South Africa
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model that is rolled out in one or more communities
How many people does your solution currently serve?
1) Shack upgrades - 200+ units per annum (1000 to 1500 people)
3) Sikhona Nathi members involved/employed in training, data collection, community support 150 people as part of a national program run by the Department of Treasury.
Why are you applying to Solve?
We are trying to solve a problem of enormous proportions. We recognize that our contribution is to design the approach, test the social and physical technologies at significant scale to be able to prove the efficacy of our concept, and to promote its replication by as many other actors as possible. We believe solve is in a position to help catalize funding by exposing our work to the correct funders.
All the community members that we support face significant risks or are victims of climate compounded disasters. They are poor and vulnerable. It is the States responsibility to assist communities who have suffered from disasters. Currently local government is grossly underspending on its disaster response funds that are available from National Government. This is starkly reflected in the following figures. As at the end of July 2022 National Treasury had made R5,3 billion available for disaster relief but only R674 million has been spent.To this end we would need support on legal and regulatory matters.
We need assistance with South Africa specific legal and regulatory matters. This relates specifically to our interest in bio-based construction systems. We are acquainted with, and were marginally involved in, the Government’s Value Added Industries (VAI) project (now defunct) in a program called Working on Fire that designed a unique Biomass Insulated Concrete Binder to be used to turn invasive alien trees into fire resistant construction material for low income homes. Patents were pending when the Department of the Environment discontinued the VAI project. We are in contact with many of the initial players, some of whom recognize our potential to move their carbon sequestered product at scale. There are clearly legal challenges, now that the government institution that applied for the patent is no longer in operation.
Monitoring and evaluation is an area we feel we need to improve in as it is a critical component to demonstrate our impact and leverage additional funding.
We also believe that MIT Solve is the correct platform for us to learn branding/marketing strategy, social and global media if we are to go to scale both more broadly in South Africa and to promote our disaster response methodology globally.
MIT is the correct institution to provide us support to improve our drone imaging of disaster areas and ideally tie this into a software that can outomatically translate the image into percieved household footprints from which we can use as a base to establishing household size and location prior to the disaster.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Ms Andrea Lynn Bolnick
What makes your solution innovative?
We have designed a simple yet innovative alternative to makeshift dwellings using readily available material that is far stronger than what the majority of shacks are made from fire retardant zinc assembled with airtight interlocking sheets. Our structure is durable, flexible in design, adaptable, fire and flood resistant and affordable. The strength of the material and the way it interlocks makes the shelter resistant to extreme weather. The especially treated Zinc material is much cheaper and less environmentally damaging than conventional cement-based material. Because of its wide appeal we plan to continue using this prototype but we are well positioned to search and research into neutral carbon materials that would meet our criteria. One such product we are very keen to pursue is the BIC material. The BIC material is unique, and out-performs all other materials to which we have been exposed for green, and sustainable construction. It is a compelling technology to use to mainstream building carbon-negative, fire-proof structures from destructive invasive biomass. The main ingredients are fly ash (as a binding agent) and wood chips from invasive alien trees. Widespread use of this product will help increase the clearing of invasive plants – a global environmental scourge. It will also prevent leaving cleared biomass in the fields wherever clearing is done whether legal or not and thereby creating an additional fire-risk. It creates job opportunities for the marginalised and makes a very useful product in the form of walling and roofing material for improved shacks and low-income homes. Finally, both products are light, easy to transport as well as being easy to construct (and dismantle). The two elements we need to resolve for its incorporation into our stable of offerings is to ensure it is affordable and socially accepted. We are well positioned to test this technology while we continue using the Ikhayalami prototype that has withstood the test of time as no alternative has proven better for the past 17 years. It is highly effective and meets all our criteria.
We link the application of our building technology to deep community participation in the design and construction process. In so doing we develop an internal social dynamo for replication and for scale. Delivery of solutions creates dependency. Co-production liberates capacity. Building horizontal networks between communities provides the mechanism for scaling up. The technology is sufficiently easy to produce and work with so that communities can drive any or all parts of the supply chain (distribution, construction, and of course social oversight) with minimal (but dedicated) professional support. Community participation also amplifies transparency, accountability, and ownership. Their absence from many development initiatives contribute to the high rates of failure.
Our disaster response is innovative in that as soon we can we get drone footage of the area as footprint record of where shacks were located and match this with the information we get from those affected by the disaster. With this information we map the settlement using CAD and work with the community to design an improved layout. Ikhayalami championed re-blocking in South Africa and we brought a number of innovative elements to the process including a shelter upgrade, taking heed of family size and previous shack size in the design process. In terms of scale we have set frameworks for the amount of material we are able to provide for each family. While community processes are not necessarily unique the way we respond to disasters is, by coproducing the solution with affected communities through the provision of an innovative shelter prototype and through the implementation of a re-blocking strategy developed by Ikhayalami with the intention of taking this to scale nationally and internationally.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?
Our impact goals for the next year
· Fire retardant shacks start replacing poor quality material and structures.
· Informal settlements reconfigured for better safety and resilience.
For the next five years
· Informal Settlements safe from fires.
· Lives and livelihoods of informal settlers improved.
The Next Year.
· Replacing fire retardant shacks
We will design and build over two hundred prototypes in Cape Town’s informal settlements. We will use our specially treated zinc material while we secure rights to use the biomass insulated concrete material that we have identified and we will adapt the technology to needs in the settlements (lighter panels, specific interlocking qualities).
· Informal settlements reconfigured for better safety and resilience.
We will combine this with examples of settlement wide spatial reconfiguration that will include the upgrading of shacks. The number will depend on multiple external factors such as where fires take places but based on past experiences we expect a minimum of three such projects. We will replicate in other cities and promote our findings through research and international exposure
For the next five years
· Informal Settlements safe from fires.
While we roll out these solutions in the communities where our partners have a presence we will use local networks to which we belong (such as National Treasury’s Community Development Programme) to extend our reach and transfer technological and social solutions to other agencies. We will do the same through our international networks (MIT, Ashoka Foundation, Loeb Alumni) and through MIT Solve reach out to UN Habitat and regugee agencies to adopt our model - re-blocking after disaster with an innovative shelter that is easy to trasnport, quick to build, fire and flood resistant and affordable.
· Lives and livelihoods improved.
We will improve lives through our technical interventions but will supplement that with livelihood opportunities in the manufacture of our technologies and the construction of upgraded shacks. We will use our local NGO and Government networks to scale beyond our immediate reach, especially through the contract we have secured through the local government to participate in their public employment programme.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
iKhayalami's progress indicators.
1) We will measure the number of households for whom we ensure access to adequate, safe, fire retardant and affordable housing
2) We will do the same for basic services and the recofiguration of slums to make them more resilient
3) We will evaluate how and to what extent we have enhanced community capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning
4) We will assess how and to what extent we have decreased the direct economic losses caused by fires and related disasters, in the settlements where we have built.
5) We will measure the reduction of adverse environmental impacts on the people living in the settlements that we upgrade.
6) we will calculate the number and size of public open spaces we have opened up and greened as a result of our upgrading interventions
7) We will measure how we have improved resilience to disasters, especially fires and developed disaster risk management strategies in the settlements where we work.
What is your theory of change?
1) Activities
a) mobilise communities b) identify risks c) build community capacity to respond d) design appropriate technologies e) construction fire retardant shacks e) link all upgrading interventions to livelihoods
2) Outputs
a) settlement reblocking ,b) appropriate technologies, c) upgraded shacks, d) organised communities, e) jobs
3) Short term Outcomes
a) Organized urban poor communities at the settlement level exhibit solidarity and social cohesion and the ability to collectively identify issues and implement solutions
b) Organized urban poor communities create the conditions whereby shacks that are destroyed or at risk can be upgraded with appropriate technologies
c) organised communities redesign their land so that it is upgradable through the provision of basic services
d) favourable conditions created for jobs and skills training
4) Long term Outcomes
a) through collective action and appropriate technological design, health and hygiene, livelihood opportunities, and safety from climate crises improved in informal settlements
b) Fire risks and disasters measurably reduced
c) increased formal and informal livelihood opportunities and enterprise creation within Ikhayalami settlements and beyond
d) Transformation of the built environment from unsafe settlements to more secure integrated neighbourhoods is facilitated
The implementation and monitoring of our theory of change will be bottom up based on community forums, organised group sessions and questionnaires backed up with familiairity with latest trends in technical research and development in in human centered design
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
We use building material technology and social technology and their effective application is always interconnected. The building material technology is easy to trasnport, quick to build (one day), durable, fire and flood resistant and strong. It is made from interlocking zinc sheeting whose application is for roofs of large buildings such as malls. We have repurposed its application.
A home provides the base for emotional and physical security, health and well being. It is for this reason that we have chosen the home as the basis for our innovation in response to disasters where people loose everything. From this base we are able to conduct further research into already existing carbon neutral or carbon negative material as we are well positioned to test its application and whether it will be socially accepted. Its fire retardant properties were demonstrated on numerous occasions when prototypes survived fires that gutted shacks in close proximity. This criterion is essential to the project.
We are not bound to our existing prototype however in all the years of operating we have yet to find other low carbon materials that are better than what we have designed. In the past 4 years we have identified a carbon negative bio-material but it is yet to be used for upgrading shacks - although the ability to create thin but fire resistant boards has been determined in scientific conditions.
The provision of a vastly improved structure forms the basis for our intervention post disaster as it incentivizes community evolvement and participation. Our re-blocking methodology incorporates the use of drones, architectural software.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
www.ikhayalami.org
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
How many people work on your solution team?
1 Chief Executive Officer; 1 Chief Finance Officer. 1 Programme Manager; 1 Architect, 1 Technical Researcher; 4 build team members, 1 Community Facilitator/Interlocutor. Part time: 6 community liaison officers and 8 build team members
How long have you been working on your solution?
Whle Ikhayalami has been in existence for 17 years and disaster relief has been our central activity this shift to new technologies - social and technical - is of more recent duration. We started on formalising our social technology in 2020 (Covid linked and our innovative bio-based research in 2021
What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?
Ikhayalami is a diverse organisation, reflective of South African Society with 22 black staff members, and 1 caucasian. Back staff members come from 4 different South African ethnic groups and one Ghanaian. There are 13 women and 12 men. Given South Africa's history of economic inclusion based on race we regard equity as an important objective of the programme. There are 3 black members of a management staff of 4. 22 staff members out of 25 are shack dwellers themselves. Ikhayalami is an open and inclusive organisation. In addition to creating a welcoming and respectful environment we open our premises to a range of community groups from informal settlements. Our Board is charged with the special responsibility of monitoring the organisation's commitment to diversity, equity, equality and inclusion.
What is your business model?
Our organisation is now in the process of developing a proper business model for the first time We are doing this with the guidance of professionals referred to us by the SAB Foundation's innovation hub Much more reflection and amendment is required but this is what we have achieved to date. In our case this is a rather unconventional model because we work exclusively with slum dwellers from very poor backgrounds who are completely unfamiliar with this approach In keeping with our organisational approach we do nothing without consulting our partners and our clients. As indicated in earlier answers we have developed a clear articulation/description of what we do, what are our outputs and what are our intended outcomes.
We have been working on defining what social value we provide. Again this is clearly articulated in earlier sections of this report. We have narrowed it down to improving safety, building community, transferring skills and creating job opportunities. The process is still not sufficiently advanced for us to conduct social impact measurements. However we are clear that these will be jointly driven and results compiled by our staff, our social movement partners and a wide range of previous clients.
Our CFO heads up our work on our financial value, together with a qualified bookkeeper on our Board. This involves assessing and managing our income from donor sources and sales as well as stock. We also plan to quantify the value of upgraded shacks This produces its own challenge because there are only informal references which are for products less valuable than our own. It also involves but along with social value this is the most important indicator of our effectiveness.
While we have a thorough understanding of our target market, we will return to a past activity of conducting interviews and completing surveys with our past clients and with other shack dwellers from those settlements who have built their own shacks or used other (informal) service providers.
We have developed a framework for our key resources - our human capital, our technologies, our material in stock and our networks both in the communities and in the development sector at large.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?
We have spend considerable time this last year reaching out to donors to join our existing cohort that includes two small but generous foundations who, in total, have been supporting us for more than 25 years. We have brought in the services of a fund-raiser, currently on a voluntary basis but moving over to contract in the near future.
We have developed a very innovative financial product where we work with a partner NGO to approach the employees of domestic workers who live in the risky and squalid conditions that we seek to improve and who have sought our intervention. We negotiate with both parties to arrange employer provided guarantees or total or partial finance. We intend to expand this to small companies and middle level corporates.
Ikhayalami already operates a small income generating venture that sells it improved fire retardant Zinc structures to interested better-off buyers in the settlements Revenue is earned through a mark-up on the material, labour for the build and in some cases through interest earnings on loans.
Ikhayalami recognises that Governments have an obligation to support and protect their citizens. There are many disaster relief related programmes from national treasuries - either with direct local funds or with funds from international agencies. Ikhayalami regularly engages the state (and some international agencies) for such support and has recently succeeded in securing public employment funding for the labour required for its community mobilisation and the manufacturing and construction of its improved shacks.
A new and promising opportunity hinges on our potential success in securing manufacturing licences for the bio-based wall and ceiling panels (and bricks). Should we succeed we will set up a social enterprise that will market these products to middle income families who are conscious of their carbon footprints and are ready to use alternative technologies.
Solution Team
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Our Organization
Ikhayalami Development Services