Factors Influencing Urbanization of Informal Settlements in Cities, Case of Eldoret Municipality, Uasin Gishu County, Kenya
Abstract
With urbanization has come growth of the urban poor and informal settlements, also referred
to as slums. A whopping 32% of the world’s urban population lives in slums. Even with
modest successes in poverty reduction and upgrading informal settlements, the world’s slum
population could still reach 889 million by 2030. Informal settlements are densely populated
and lack basic property rights and access to critical infrastructure, such as clean water and
sanitation.This study departed from the previous studies looking into this issue and
concentrated only on Eldoret town and the informal settlements that have sprung up in the
last few years such as Munyaka, Kamukunji, Huruma and Langas slums. The objectives of
this research were to find out how availability of social amenities, cheap transport systems,
availability of industries and new technology have influenced urbanization of informal
settlements in Eldoret town. To realize the purpose of the study, a descriptive survey design
was adopted. The population for this study included all residents of Munyaka slums in
Eldoret. Staff from the Immigration and Planning Departments of the County Government
were included in the population of study, bringing the population of interest to a total of
20,100.The study used simple random sampling. And the researcher therefore selected 396
households within Munyaka slum based on a proportionate stratified random sampling
procedure, with which samples from various categories will be drawn. Data was collected
using questionnaires that contain open and closed ended questions that were administered to
the selected residents and employees of the immigration and planning departments. Piloting
was done to test for ambiguities and inadequacies before the actual data collection. The
instrument was piloted in Nyalenda Slums in Kisumu where 20 residential households and 5
people from relevant county department were selected at random to fill the questionnaires.
Data collected from pilot samples were coded, classified and analysed using SPSS version
20, using Cronbach Reliability coefficient thereby obtaining a coefficient of 0.69. Data
analysis began with data cleaning: editing, coding arranged for analysis using descriptive and
inferential statistics such as frequencies, means, percentages and inferential statistics. Data
analysis was aided by the use of computer programs SPSS v 20. Chi- square tests will be
conducted to investigate the research questions to see the relationship between the variables
of the study. A response rate of 93.413% was achieved of which 54.0% of the respondents
sampled were Female in gender. The findings reflect that 74.9% of the respondents belonged
to the age group 20-30 and 38.1% of the sampled population had gone through secondary
education. 43.1% of the sampled population were employed and working within Eldoret
town. The findings proved that 87.2% of the respondents did agree to improvement of health
facilities within the informal settlements of Eldoret Town. This was further appraised by
96.3% of the sampled population who recorded to be satisfied with the services offered by the
health facilities within Eldoret. 94.3% of the sampled population did record to take 30
minutes to get to town to do their day to day activities, this indicates an improvement in the
transport systems, as the researcher further obtained more information on the road status and
found that 56.9% of the sampled population agreed to this. Majority of the sampled
population 93.47% reflected not to have understood how industrialisation had improved, the
findings also reflected that 87.2% of the sampled population did interact with solar water
filters in purification of the water that they use in their day to day activities.37.1% of the
sampled population did strongly agree to the improvement of the mobile industry thus
improvement in communication systems
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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