Life in the largest slum in Africa

But you can’t miss it. Seen from above, roofs vie with each other for space like rows of sharks’ teeth. As far as the eye can see, the mass of un-coordinated streets and shacks stretch out beneath you.

It is only when you go in, though, that you really experience what life is like in Kibera.

One woman, standing at her vegetable stall on the side of a mud road in the slum, tells me she has no running water, that rubbish goes uncollected on the side of the road and there is no plumbing for sewage.

I don’t have to look far to see the huge piles of rubbish – in many places you have no choice but to walk over them as they obscure the way. The smell is horrendous, but children play alongside because they have no choice, and people walk to work across them.

It is the vegetable-stall woman’s first week of business, having only just set the stall up with money from a community savings and loan group CARE helped to establish.

"I am quite confident that people will buy my vegetables, everyone needs to eat," she says. And as late afternoon draws in, more people start setting up food stalls on the main thoroughfares of the slum. Fish is being barbequed over a fire, ugali – the country’s maize dish – is on offer. Some are heating nuts as a quick snack for labourers returning from work.

The slum is full of creative business-people, entrepreneurs who take an opportunity to make money when they see it. And even though many of these snacks are being sold for only a handful of Kenyan shillings (just over 100 KES are equal to £1), that money changing hands in the slum is keeping people going – and helping those in CARE’s savings and loans groups to save. Each member of a group saves a set amount of money each month in a communal pot, and can then take out a loan to start up a small business with the money, which is then paid back in to the pot.

Justine Mokua, is a typical entrepreneur: a garbage collector, and running a car wash and upholstery business, he also helps CARE raise awareness about HIV and AIDS through drama and poetry. HIV prevalence rates are far higher in Kibera than elsewhere in Nairobi. More than one in five people are living with HIV.

The reality is that in the slum, life is hard. Life expectancy for men and women is around 50, and as people live in such squalid and dense conditions, with 3,000 people to every hectare, diseases spread very quickly.

“You have to understand Kibera,” says Pascale Mailu, who manages CARE’s HIV work in the slum. “It’s like a different reality. You cannot imagine what life in the slum is like unless you see it. But it is important to know, because the slum is growing, and around the world, millions of people live in these conditions. CARE needs to help people to work their way out of the poverty they live in.”