In 2019, Mike Makwela went to Skoonplaas, one of the informal settlements in the east of Johannesburg, South Africa, to meet the leaders of this community without being given any specific address, only directions. But he found himself lost in this municipality’s unpaved alleys and roads, with 2,165 households and approximately 8,000 inhabitants.
A few weeks later, when the encounter finally occurred, Makwela said, “I wish these streets had names. It’s impossible to find anything if you are not from around here.” Little did he know that his wish could transform the lives of Skoonplaas’ residents, who settled in this land in 1974, and have a ripple effect on its little economy and employment.
As South Africa’s population continues to grow, citizens are flocking to the urban centers. If they don’t find an affordable place to live, they end up building shanty homes around the big cities, usually on municipal land. Settlers have high expectations that municipalities will eventually intervene to urbanize the area and provide essential services, but this is an increasingly forlorn hope.
Makwela works for Planact, a South African non-governmental organization founded some years before the end of the Apartheid in the early 1990s. “Plantact addresses the vulnerability of citizens in informal settlements and focuses on improving their squalor living,” explains its Executive Director, Frederick Kusambiza Kiingi, while the local governments decide what to do with the land people desperately occupy. Painstakingly, says Kusambiza Kiingi, Planact has paved the way for “negotiations between the municipalities and informal settlement communities.” But this can be a long process. Local governments struggle to keep up with the influx of people around urbanization and have begun considering unconventional remedies.
One was Makwela’s wish: don’t wait; give an address to people living in informal settlements. In the days following his meeting with the community leaders of Skoonplaas, Makwela asked them to engage a group of unemployed young people who could first work on designing a map of the informal settlement. After that, the community would agree on street names through consultation, using digital addressing or plus codes to give numbers to the individual homes. Developed by Google, the plus code system makes it easier to encode location than to show GPS coordinates in the usual form of latitude and longitude.
When Planact approached Google International with the project, they were immediately on board, said Makwela proudly in a TV interview. With the support of the city of Johannesburg, Planact entered into a formal agreement with Google in 2020. Planact staff received training on plus codes and learned to use a mobile app called Addressmaker and a measuring wheel for the mapping exercise. The people working on the project went from one shed to another and gave individual homes their coordinates.
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For the first time in 50 years, the residents of Skoonplaas got an address for their homes and the first of all informal settlements in South Africa. The plus codes were printed onto blue boards and attached to their houses in a visible place, much like a regular house number. Soon, the Plus Codes were nicknamed ‘MV numbers’ by residents in reference to the MV that prefixes each of the codes.
Planact’s formula for turning around the informal settlement started with simply impacting everyday life. Now, residents with an address can register to attend school, vote, apply for city services, receive deliveries, receive emergency services, direct friends to their homes, or obtain bail, even for minor offenses. People are not invisible anymore.
Also, the dynamics of Skoonplass have begun to change. Having an address in informal settlements could drastically reduce criminal activities and domestic violence. Addresses have shortened response times by police and emergency services – ambulances can finally find individual households on the map. A resident of Skoonplass explained how the police were looking for a suspect in a violent crime, and he was seen entering a household where he was hiding from the police. A concerned community member shared the MV number with the police, and the man was arrested.
Moreover, the support center for victims of gender-based violence is now able to send police immediately to their households with the assistance of the MV numbers during episodes of violence or abuse, where women would previously have had very little hope of intervention. Social workers can also locate victims of gender-based violence in need of psychosocial services, who previously may not have been reachable at all.
City planners can deliver services, generate revenue, and conduct proper development and urban planning. Addresses also encourage responsible citizens, making them accountable, for example, for waste management faults. In Skoonplaas, the large informal dumping site on the southern end of the settlement was cleared within weeks of the launch of the numbers.
“These addresses bridge the gap between informality and the formal urban landscape, but foremost, they should bring about socio-economic transformation,” says Frederick Kusambiza Kiingi, Executive Director of Planact.
Indeed, there have been implications for South Africa’s economy, too. Residents in Skoonplaas can finally open a bank account. It is also estimated that the value of their homes has increased just by being identified on a map. A man in Skoonplaas who runs a Shisanyama business from his home (Shisanyama is the term used in townships to describe where people make and serve barbecue meat) is now employing four other residents of the settlement as delivery agents; people WhatsApp him their orders and MV numbers and have their dinner within minutes.
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Surprisingly, as local as this project might sound, it is under the umbrella of the Social Employment Fund, one of the many programs of the Presidential Employment Stimulus that President Cyril Ramaphosa announced in October 2020. Unemployment levels in South Africa are incredibly high, particularly for the youth, which is around 45%. “The pandemic exacerbated the urgency to address this massive unemployment but also created the opportunity to do things differently. The response was a mass employment program initiated by the Presidency,” explains Kate Philip, Programme Lead, as we met this month during The Bay Awards in Bilbao. The program has received an award in the category of Prosperity Catalyst.
The focus of this government unemployment program is striking: hyperlocal and social. “While the term’ social employment’ is new, it intends to foreground the hard work already being done by civil society organizations to enable community-driven solutions to local problems,” says Philip. The program has an impact on participants and their communities. It builds on the capacity of community-based organizations and aims to stimulate local economies, strengthening the social fabric. Kate goes into explaining part of the philosophical dimension of unemployment: “It has terrible psychosocial impacts on people. They feel a loss of self-esteem. They feel their life is meaningless. Yet, even when labor doesn’t have a market value, it can create social value.”
“With 55% youth unemployment, in my view, employment is an absolute imperative for the people and the stability of our society. Therefore, we can’t leave employment to markets alone. It matters too much for people and societies, and we need instruments to unlock the social value of labor. The Social Employment Fund is intended to be such an instrument,” explains Philip.
Planact is one of the non-governmental organizations that collaborates with the Social Employment Fund. With their support, Planact has begun working on an advocacy campaign to standardize the recognition of an address for residents in informal settlements across the country and spread their learning in Skoonplaas about the initiative’s benefits.
This address revolution is just one of the many local actions that the Social Employment Fund intends to trigger, engaging people in work and energizing the economy while serving the common good in South Africa. According to the Home Equals report by the nonprofit organization Habitat for Humanity, improving housing conditions in informal settlements contributes to increasing the gross domestic product (GDP) and income per capita by as much as 10.5% in some countries.
In addition to the activation of Skoonplaas, the Social Employment Fund has begun to see other green sprouts, from urban agriculture to food kitchens, dance, drama, public art, and community safety initiatives like the “Sisterhood Advocates.” These women, known as the “Pinkies” because of their pink bibs, have heroically guided gender-violence survivors through the intricacies of the justice system, facilitating protection orders. Some paralegal volunteers have been employed in permanent positions in the Department of Justice.
In Skoonplaas, individuals operating under the Social Employment Fund to ensure safety within their community have emerged as champions of security and community well-being for taking things into their own hands. They went beyond their official duties and decided to protect the only ATM for the community in a nearby formal area. This ATM is a lifeline serving thousands of formal and informal residents who depend on this facility to access cash for vital expenses such as groceries, transportation, and bills. The safety teams’ proactive efforts involved organizing patrols around the ATM, especially during high-risk times when residents from informal and formal areas withdraw cash.
Residents in the formal area recognized that the safety team from Skoonplaas was not simply motivated by self-interest; they were safeguarding the ATM for everyone’s collective benefit. This has cultivated a sense of unity between the formal and informal communities. South Africa needs all these little revolutions that could snowball into reducing unemployment and uplifting its young people.
