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Many of the people who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change live in low-income and informal settlements in and around urban centres in Africa, Asia and Latin America. While there is a growing recognition of the importance of urban resilience, there is little documented evidence of how collective actions undertaken by residents of these communities can contribute to this. This paper describes the processes adopted by the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda for responding to a variety of challenges – and explains how these not only address the immediate needs of these communities but also contribute to building resilience at the scale of the individual, household, community and city. It links the experiences of manufacturing matoke briquettes, developing new construction materials for low-income housing, and improving drainage and freshwater supplies to some of the key features of an urban resilience agenda, and makes the case for broader international support and funding to these local responses to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the enumerations of informal settlements undertaken in 2010 by the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda in the cities of Arua, Jinja, Kabale, Mbale and Mbarara, covering about 200,000 people. It describes how this federation was founded and subsequently developed through an earlier enumeration and initial work in informal settlements in Kampala. It also discusses the relationship between the federation and other actors, including the national government and Cities Alliance, and their role in supporting the formation of the federation. It explains how federation members developed the capacity to undertake the enumerations and later improved upon those skills, for example developing a GIS, to support the planning and implementation of upgrading by federation, local and national government agencies. The paper ends with a discussion of the way enumerations can encourage the rapid maturation of urban poor groups and their relationship with their cities and other development actors and the larger political context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]