Household Survey in Nairobi (Kibera & Eastleigh) for the "Urban Waterscapes and the Pandemic" research project

"Urban Waterscapes and the Pandemic" research project: The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the importance of water access as an essential service protecting human health. Yet, the prevention of human-to-human transmission of the novel virus may be impacted by uneven geographies of water access. The pandemic presented a dilemma in water-deprived urban areas as residents needed to find ways to adapt to new hygiene standards and local Covid-19 responses. Focusing on Nairobi, Kenya’s capital with historically uneven and highly contested geographies of water, we mobilized the concept of waterscapes in order to understand how Nairobi’s waterscapes have changed during the pandemic; how these waterscape changes relate to new requirements; and how far they reflect adaptive creativity or re-produce urban fragmentation. Funded by DFG, the project is a 12-month-long collaboration between IPS, the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Nairobi, and the British Institute for Eastern Africa.

Household survey in Kibera and Eastleigh: As part of the "Urban Waterscapes and the Pandemic" research project, the project team conducted a household survey in two target areas of Nairobi, namely Kibera and Eastleigh. The survey was conducted in April and May 2022 with the support of 11 enumerators. Spread purposefully over four sub-locations in each target area, the survey included more than 400 respondents per area. The final data set has been quality-checked and cleaned for further analysis;  personal details about the respondents and the enumerators that may reveal their identity have been removed.