By Nina Schoonman, Yirah Conteh
In October 2024 Slum Dwellers International (SDI) affiliates from nine countries came together in Freetown, Sierra Leone to exchange knowledge on community-led climate action in informal settlements.
Hosted by the Sierra Leone Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDURP) and the NGO, Centre of Dialogue on Human Settlement and Poverty Alleviation (CODOHSAPA), and co-organised by Cities Alliance, SDI and IIED, the exchange sought to connect the local knowledge and experiences of SDI affiliates with global discourses on climate action.
Over the course of the week, one key message started to emerge. For low-income and informal urban dwellers, climate action is not a separate agenda. The work that they are doing to improve tenure security, build better housing, access basic services, promote sustainable livelihoods and restore nature, is improving resilience to climate risks, while sustainable construction, improved connectivity and energy transition to renewables can support low-carbon development. By upgrading their settlements, communities are taking climate action. Simply put, upgrading is climate action (PDF).
Making equitable climate action a priority
As part of the learning exchange, we visited different settlements and met with Freetown’s progressive mayor. We heard that climate action is the city’s number one priority, as reflected by its ambitious Climate Action Strategy (PDF), and learned that the Transform Freetown Agenda positions informal settlement upgrades as one of the critical pathways to climate action.
This work is co-led by a coalition (including FEDURP and CODOHSAPA) known as the ‘transforming lives’ consortium, designed to support the city council and the Ministry of Land, Housing and Country Planning in rolling out a comprehensive slum upgrading programme in three areas: Kolleh Town, Cockle Bay and Kroo Bay.
This is the latest in a series of insights and interviews, curated by IIED senior associate David Satterthwaite, examining different aspects of global urban change
Introducing the settlements
Kolleh Town is a compact, low-lying informal settlement of approximately 9,845 residents, on 11 acres. Residents predominantly engage in fishing, selling wood or charcoal, petty trading and motorbike transport. Flooding is the settlement’s most serious climate risk, disproportionately impacting women, children and the elderly.
As part of the transforming lives programme, successful climate and upgrading efforts include: co-designing an Area Action Plan (AAP) to guide future development of housing, infrastructure, services and green spaces (with high, medium and low-risk zones); establishing a local learning platform to facilitate climate adaptation knowledge sharing; planting 80,000 mangroves (with a 94% survival rate); and introducing youth-led waste collection.
Cockle Bay, home to around 7,647 people, was established in 1998 by displaced families who reclaimed land along a creek for shelter and livelihood. Today it spans 45 acres and is known for sand mining, petty trading, cockle picking and fishing. On state-owned land within a designated RAMSAR (protected) wetland site, most is less than one metre above sea level.
Most structures are ‘pan body’ (corrugated iron), designed to be easily dismantled or relocated. Coastal flooding, driven by sea level rise and poor drainage, poses the most severe risk, particularly for women, children and older people. Under transforming lives, the community has co-designed an AAP and mapped risk zones to guide future upgrades.
Interventions include the creation of flood paths and drainage improvements, youth-led waste collection, and a mangrove restoration initiative (with limited success due to ongoing sand mining and land banking activities). A community learning platform supports local engagement and resilience-building.
Kroo Bay is one of the most densely populated and flood-exposed informal settlements in Freetown, with over 21,000 residents occupying just 32 acres of waterfront land. Residents depend heavily on fishing and petty trading.
The area, built largely on reclaimed land and solid waste, is acutely vulnerable to annual flooding and coastal erosion with floods occurring every year since 2008, and major events like the 2019 floods displacing thousands. Most dwellings are fragile, constructed from mud, stick and corrugated iron on unstable foundations.
Through transforming lives, Kroo Bay has become a priority site for flood mitigation and climate adaptation – including the employment of 200 residents in planting 75,000 mangroves to protect the shoreline. The initiative is also helping to build awareness and community participation in addressing environmental hazards through data collection and participatory planning processes.
Interconnectivity key to progress
Transforming lives focuses on dignified and affordable housing, sustainable environment and improved livelihoods. As one of the report authors commented: “Sustainable livelihoods are very central to [the] survival and dignity of people, so it should be the fulcrum of our interventions.”
It is clear that these pieces are all interconnected. In work on sustainability, all will depend on others as pillars. Unless they are all moving forward, one priority can’t advance on its own.
In Freetown, we saw that upgrading is climate action. Taking a global perspective, it is clear that the urgency for effective, integrated and inclusive urban adaptation strategies is growing, and that these strategies need to be rooted in local realities to address local needs.
It is also clear that slum upgrading is an effective form of climate action that addresses environmental challenges and climate risks along with unmet basic service and housing needs – and socio-economic inequalities. However, national and local governments, donors, climate finance agencies and other stakeholders have yet to acknowledge this.
Working with informality not against it
By working with informality rather than against it, upgrading acknowledges and supports the realities of urban poor residents. As Sarah Nambozo (National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda) commented: “With participatory planning, all the risks will be considered and planned for because [the] community knows what issues need to be addressed.”
Another delegate, Papa Keita of urbaSEN, reflected that: “Participatory planning [is] part of the work. We believe [the] city should be for and made by inhabitants.”
Unlike top-down, technocratic approaches that risk marginalising informal settlements, community-led upgrading that works with informality, tenure insecurity and informal economies, can leverage local knowledge, foster collaboration and challenge conventional development models – creating space for transformative change.
Shifting power
This is not just a question of upgrading settlements – it is about shifting power. Too often, informality is framed as a problem to be ‘fixed’ rather than as a foundation for solutions. But upgrading is not only about physical improvements. It’s a political process that challenges exclusion, puts decision-making in the hands of communities, and reshapes how cities evolve in the face of climate change.
Examples from Mukuru, Kenya, and Freetown show that participatory and risk-informed upgrading are not just about structural upgrades – they are pathways to more just and resilient urban development.
Call for funding
Locally-controlled finance is urgently needed to challenge marginalisation and rethink ‘development-as-usual’. Urban poor communities, which face severe funding constraints, are drawing on their own hard-earned savings to take action.
Just 3.5% of global climate finance (equivalent to US$1.2 billion) has been allocated to projects that include the urban poor. If climate finance mechanisms are designed to deliver just, effective and impactful climate action, they must shift towards funding locally-led solutions that work with informality, rather than against it.
As Richard Bockarie of CODOHSAPA describes it: “A wall has been built around climate finance”. It is time to dismantle that wall, because we would do well to remember that, even in a climate-changed world, in the words of Patience Mudimu of the Dialogue on Shelter Trust: “the end goal is upgrading lives, upgrading settlements.”
The question is not whether upgrading is climate action – we know it is. The real question is whether governments, donors and climate finance institutions will acknowledge that the urban poor are indispensable partners in scaling real solutions – and invest in their leadership.
They are already taking action. The question is, will the rest of the world step up?
With thanks to: the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor and People’s Dialogue, Muungano wa Wanavijiji and SDI-Kenya, Malawi Federation of Urban and Rural Poor and Centre for Community Organisation and Development, Fédération Sénégalaise des Habitants and urbaSEN, Federation of Urban and Rural Poor Sierra Leone and Centre of Dialogue on Human Settlement and Poverty Alleviation, Tanzania Urban Poor Federation and Centre for Community Initiatives, National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda and ACTogether, Zambia Homeless and Poor People’s Federation and People’s Process on Housing and Poverty in Zambia, Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and Dialogue on Shelter for the Homeless Trust, for contributing to the development of this insight.
Further reading
Learning from informality: urban innovations for just and sustainable cities, GIZ, SDI and IIED (2025), report
Insight: Cities are vulnerable to climate change and central to its solution (November 2024)
Slum upgrading is climate action: experience and insights from the Global South (PDF), Cities Alliance (2024), publication
From informality to impact, Global Resilience Partnership (2024), briefing note
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Previously Published on iied.org with Creative Commons License
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