Rough Draft

 “In fact, many say it’s the largest slum in Africa. Kibera’s true population isn’t known, but there are probably as many people living here as there are in San Francisco, packed into housing few Americans could fathom,” from Cities of the Poor I: Life in the Slums (Kenya). Slums are small over-crowded shanty towns on the outskirts of large cities around the world that can create problems for the populations lining there. Slums can create problems for these people because the slums are located in dangerous places, the people live in small areas together, and it is easier to be infected with diseases and die from them. Slums are usually located in very dangerous places for the people living there.

Most of the slums in the world are located in areas too dangerous for the people living there. “Squatters or slum lords put up shacks on land that no one else wants to develop: flood plains, toxic waste dumps, and steep hillsides.” The construction of the slums on this land leaves it vulnerable to various natural disasters. These disasters and even the very place the slums are on can cause many problems for the people living there. These problems no matter how small can affect many of the people since they live packed together.

The populations living in the slums are living together in an extremely over-crowded way. “Kibera’s true population isn’t known, but there are probably as many people living here as there are in San Francisco, packed into housing few Americans could fathom.” The people living here are living in a space only large enough to hold about a quarter of an American city. Yet many more people are packed into the space. In slums there can be as many as eight or ten people living in a shack with only one room at a time. These over-crowded conditions, and the fact that there is very little medical care in the slums, leads to the faster spread of diseases.

In the over-crowded slums it is easier for a person there to contract a disease and die from it. “According to the United Nations slum children in sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illnesses than rural children. ”Many people living in the slums, especially the women, are more likely to contract HIV. There is very little medical care for the populations of the slums, and this causes the people of the slums to be more likely to die because of the diseases. The dangerous locations, the over-crowded living spaces, and higher chances of contracting a disease are all ways that slums affect the populations.