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