Life without a modern cities basic services is standard in Angola's shanty towns

For families living in the shanty towns of Angola’s capital city, clean water, toilets and rubbish collection services often just don’t exist.

Woman on dump, LUPP project Angola

Massive overcrowding has resulted in a landscape of waste strewn across the streets in which children play. This is the harsh reality for thousands of people living in the city of Luanda.

Recognising the desperate need for access to sanitation and hygiene, CARE International is working with three other international aid agencies - Save the Children UK, One World Action, and the Development Workshop - in conjunction with the Government of Angola, to provide people with access to basic services and to help them improve their living conditions and get jobs.

Luanda Urban Poverty Programme (LUPP) focuses on providing these services, which include the construction of water taps and toilets, baby-sitting programmes for children of working parents and so on. But the project also works to improve people’s livelihoods by promoting equal and inclusive opportunities for the poor, at both local and national government levels, as a way of tackling the underlying reasons why people are forced to live in such bad conditions in Luanda.

Women from LUPP programme Angola

So the project has successfully built up networks of community based organisations, helping to increase local participation and generate community awareness of the problems being faced by those living in the city. Through this increased local awareness people can become more confident and aware of their individual rights and their ability to make a difference to their own neighbourhoods.

LUPP focuses on making the relationships between the community and the government stronger, so that the experiences of the community can help to influence government policy on improving the lives of the people living in the shanty towns of Luanda.

Through these activities, LUPP has played an important role in putting urban poverty high on the public policy agenda, while also helping people in community based organisations to negotiate their rights to basic services. In short, CARE is helping to put the power back in the hands of the people.

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