Grounding infrastructure: community ownership of an international cooperation project in Kibera, Nairobi

Abstract

International infrastructure projects are deeply ensconced in debates about power, intentions, and imaginaries of progress that also stir debate about what it means to decolonize international relations and projects that nominally build improvements in low-income environments. Traditional prioritization of technical expertise, the criticality of contextual knowledge, and the dynamics of uneven partnerships involved are all central elements of these pronounced tensions in the practice of international infrastructure development. This paper instead describes an international infrastructure project that is centred on community stewardship and co-design. The infrastructure project Living Data Hubs (LDH), highlighted here, is a small-scale information and communication technology (ICT) and data management project in the informal settlement of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. In its development, equal attention was afforded to technical, conceptual, and procedural knowledge production, ensuring that both universal and contextual elements of the ICT infrastructure and data management were explicitly discussed and valued. We argue that international partnerships like LDH that give space to technical, conceptual, and procedural capacity building alike can produce community stewarded infrastructure that is sustainable and puts forward a pathway for diminishing uneven power relations and enhancing community well-being.