IHS Staff Saskia Ruijsink in Nairobi for UN-HABITAT
A good learning experience at UN Habitat
Last week while in Nairobi I spoke with Saskia Ruijsink an Academic staff member of IHS after her last working day at the UN Habitat. We met in a cafeteria in downtown Nairobi. Saskia spoke to me and reflected on her half year experience with the UN Habitat.
How did it arise that you were invited to work for the UN Habitat?
“IHS has a long lasting collaboration with UN Habitat. One of the staff members went last year on maternity leave and she requested me to replace her temporarily. In the past I had already worked with her and she felt that I would fit in her position.”
In what capacity were you where working for UN Habitat?
“I have been working at the head office of UN Habitat in the Shelter Branch on Land issues.
My work was concerned with: ‘How can we make land more accessible and land tenure more secure for the vulnerable people in the world.’ In lots of countries many poor people have no access to land, pay relatively too much for their plot or house and have no security of tenure. Often they are swept off their land for all kind of reasons. In a slum a bulldozer can suddenly turn up and demolish the houses of the dwellers.
My work has mainly been focused on the gender elements related to land. In many countries women are amongst the most vulnerable groups with respect to land. They are unable to, either by law or by cultural traditions, inherit land or they are restricted in the ownership of land. The work of UN Habitat is actually to try to facilitate a better accessibility to land for all of these vulnerable groups and in my case I was particularly focused on women. The land and gender issue really opened my eyes. I have never worked before on this subject. But my experience at UN Habitat has taught me how many women suffer from insecurity of tenure. The facts are alarming. I think at IHS we should put more emphasis on this issue and co-operate with ISS on this.”
Does UN Habitat give recommendations to governments on these issues?
“Actually a large share of the work of UN Habitat is advocacy work, where they try to reach out towards governments and try to influence their policy. For example my colleague Mary is engaged as an advisor for the Kenyan Government in the developing of a new land policy. Sometimes UN Habitat is directly involved in an advisory or advocacy role for a specific government. Other times they develop materials and disseminate them amongst professionals and actually build up capacity of local organisations to advocate in their countries.”
What were your main activities at UN Habitat?
“There have been two concrete tasks that I have been working on. One was the piloting of gender evaluation criteria that has been developed with different partners, universities and NGO’s. They developed a set of questions that you can use to evaluate if certain land tools or land policies, or instruments are gender sensitive or not. It is a beautiful list of questions that suggests all kinds of checks to indicate if and how women are taken into account or not. There have been three local teams. One in Nepal, one in Ghana and one in Brazil who have tested these criteria in the field. I haven been coordinating these projects from the UN Habitat side. I had to make sure that we, as UN Habitat, received all the conclusions that we needed. I spent a lot of time discussing with the pilot teams how we should proceed and what our focus and priorities should be. We are still compiling all the results. Outcomes of this process will be presented and subject of a big discussion at the World Urban Forum, which will take place at the end of March in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I will be there together with the people who have done these pilots and I shall present the outcomes of this comparative study.”
And the other task?
“I have been working on a book called, ‘Count me in’. It is about participatory enumeration. It is a surveying method that has been developed with a lot of NGO’s and the SDI, Slum Dwellers International in which the community members themselves are involved in carrying out the survey. They collect the data. Data about the family size, how many years have the family lived there, what the family income is and what the level of education is. Other questions that were asked included: Where the plot can be found, and whether the house is rented or bought. It is a form of community mapping. The collected information about the settlement can be used to mobilise the community to make demands on the government.”
What was your contribution for the book?
“Before I worked for UN Habitat, people of different organisations who have worked in the field with this type of mapping came together in Nairobi and participated in a write shop. All of them wrote a chapter during this write shop and were supported by professional editors. An artist drew illustrations related to their stories. It resulted in many drafts on many different issues. When I came to work for UN Habitat we finalised these drafts into a final book. The final editing was done by an external professional editor. But it needed to be checked and balanced by somebody within UN Habitat and I have been doing that. I have also given my contributions to the book: I have written some of the introductions and some parts of the analysis and have made the first set of conclusions. It was the first time that I have ever partaken in this sort of work. It was a wonderful learning experience. It really built up my own capacity to understand more about this methodology in two ways: the methodology of community mapping itself and how you can link this community mapping to other forms of urban management. I think the write shop methodology is very interesting for IHS, due to staff time pressure we often have difficulty to get things published. Working in this way, with an external professional editor, works very well. Maybe we at IHS can do that with a group of Alumni?”
What other experiences at UN Habitat can be useful for your work at IHS?
“I worked within a project at UN Habitat called the Global Land Tool Network, it focuses on land tools: instruments to implement land policies. It is a network organisation which has a lot of partner organisations of which UN Habitat is the secretariat. I think that in the field of our knowledge development, we at IHS, can really do much more with our partners and Alumni. The way it is organised at UN Habitat is a good lesson for IHS.
I feel that IHS should publish more with clear well written accessible publications, because it makes you more visible and you can easily share your viewpoints with others by disseminating it. UN Habitat are much better at doing this.”
Rotterdam, 25 February 2010
Johannes Odé
Publication date: Wednesday, 17 March 2010