r u NbS?
realising urban Nature-based Solutions
Generating new and practical evidence for NbS in East African cities.
About
The future of global urban development is closely linked to the future of informal settlements. Climate change is expected to have severe impacts on informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are considered key in adapting to a changing climate while realising significant social and ecological benefits.
Realising Urban Nature-based Solutions (r u NbS?) is a “learning by doing” initiative by the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) in Kenya and the Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI) in Tanzania, supported by SwedBio. The project aims to provide practical evidence for the uptake, efficiency, and scalability of NbS, specifically in managing water in informal settlements.
In the course of r u NbS, new nature-based water management solutions are co-designed and built in informal neighbourhoods in Nairobi, Embu Town (a secondary city in Kenya), and Dar es Salaam, and evaluated using a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) framework developed under the project.
NbS co -design process
To design, build, and test Nature-based Solutions (NbS), and their suitability to tackle water management challenges in informal urban neighbourhoods a participatory design and construction process can be used which involve various stages and activities. These stages and activities include;
To find out more about each stage kilck on read more.
Monitoring, Evaluation + Learning
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) is important as we are aiming to bring about knowledge exchange and to build evidence - bridging the knowledge gap on NbS in informal settlements. “Learning” is a key objective - and to do so, our interventions need to be evaluated in a robust, consistent, and comparable way.
The r u NbS MEL framework is a tool aimed at capturing the environmental, social, and economic performance of the implemented NbS under r u NbS with emphasis on perspectives of residents. The MEL framework was developed to be appropriate and applicable in the informal context, and to the specific challenges faced in such while at the same time being flexible to be applied in radically different physical contexts. Consequently, the r u NbS MEL framework gives insight into the potential and scaling of NbS.
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Rivers + People Planning Process: A Green Infrastructure and Nature-based Approach for Informal Settlements
The Rivers + People (R+P) Planning Process is a participatory neighbourhood planning methodology that seeks to reimagine the relationship between communities and natural systems in urban settings—especially in informal settlements—by integrating social, ecological, and infrastructural priorities into a coherent, locally owned plan. Originally rooted in the context of river corridors, the R+P process can equally used to develop Green Infrastructure Plans in areas without rivers, using existing drainage paths, open spaces, or other environmental features as organising elements.
At its core, R+P offers an alternative to top-down, grey infrastructure-led planning, emphasising community-driven, ecologically sensitive development. It focuses on the intersection of climate adaptation, urban resilience, and inclusive public space design, making it particularly suitable for under-resourced and climate-vulnerable neighbourhoods.
