Households Livelihood Coping Strategies in the Urban Informal Settlements the Case of Mlalakuwa Dar-es-Salaam Tanzania

Abstract

This paper explores various households livelihood coping strategies in the urban informal settlement of Mlalakuwa in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. It employed a case study method in the urban informal settlement of Mlalakuwa. Multiple data collection tools were employed, in which semi-structured interviews with key informants, field observations, sketches, mapping and photographic registration, were used in collecting primary data through household survey, while literature review, was used in collecting secondary data. Descriptive statistical and content analysis were employed in data analysis.The paper revealed that; households in the study are involved in a lot of livelihood activities, such as urban agriculture and livestock keeping (i.e. pigs, chicken and cow), as well as trading these goods in the market, shop keeping, selling pharmaceutical, monetary services (banks, and mobile money), brewing of local drink, running female and male hair dressing saloons as well as selling their products, vehicle and motor cycles repairing, milling machines, taxi-running and driving, motor cycles-running and driving, mobile shoe shining and mending, food processing and vending, food product street hawking, fish and meat butchery, selling fuel wood and charcoal, tailoring and cloth retailing, carpentry, welding and metal working, bricks and pavement material making, building materials retailing, oil and gas trading, etc. drawn by combining both tangible and intangible assets, as a strategy in coping with life stress and shocks. It argues that the informal economy plays a crucial role not only for the lower income earners, but also the middle and higher income earners, with everyone depending on one another, in different livelihood activities. Living together in one area, the three income earning groups, involves themselves in agricultural (farm) and non-agricultural (non-farm), monetary (economics) or non-monetary (non-economics), livelihood activities which all ernes them capital, as coping strategy against life stress and shocks. The paper concludes that; the households in the Mlalakuwa urban informal settlement, survives by combining various assets as a livelihood coping and recovery strategies based on their indigenous strategies and knowledge, so as to recover from daily life stress and shocks.

A conceptual analysis of the public health-architecture nexus within rapidly developing informal urban contexts

“…Informal settlements are typically defined as unplanned, autonomously built developments with little to no regulatory compliance and often developed with no tenure or landownership (Satterthwaite et al, 2020). Globally about a third of the urban populations resides in informally built urban settlements (Tesha, 2020), notably, 64% of African cities are informal, and many of them represent some form health or wellbeing deficiency due to overcrowding, poor building stock, insecure tenure and no access to water and sanitation (Pieterse, 2011a). In South Africa extent of informality is contested with the latest census results reporting 8.1% of all dwellings being informal, while the Gauteng City Region Observatory reports it 13.4% (Götz et al, 2023).…”