COVID-19 in SIS Research

Guidelines and Interviews

Our summer research consisted mainly of two facets: compiling and organizing guidelines about the response to COVID-19 and conducting semi-structured interviews with development actors in Ahmedabad, India; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Freetown Sierra Leone. 

The beginning of the project involved collecting guidelines published by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities, independent think tanks, and researchers regarding how the response to COVID-19 should be handled in informal settlements. These guidelines were grouped into categories such as WASH, education, and governance, among others. As this was occurring, emerging reports about actual responses in settlements in various cities around the world were noted as well. Information from implementation reports was matched with the guideline that it was most closely related to, and then it was decided how closely the implementation followed its cognate recommendation. We aimed to interrogate the extent to which these directives were helping those in self-organized, self-built, urban poor communities.

Concurrently, we developed a semi-structured interview guide with development actors and slum dwellers. This guide included questions across many topics, including how the pandemic response was organized, challenges encountered, communication and collaboration with other organizations and governance structures,  and data collection. We conducted more than thirty interviews over the summer with government officials, INGO workers, settlement residents, and other development actors across the three cities to learn more about how these communities have responded to the pandemic in slums and informal settlements. Emerging themes from interviews were documented as areas to further our research in the future.

Resident Survey

During summer 2020, an online survey tool was also created with the intent of being deployed to residents of the informal settlements we had been working with. This survey built off of the guidelines and recommendations we had compiled, with the goal of discovering whether these guidelines were being followed in the self-built urban poor communities we were working with. The survey was split into categories such as access to water, food, and sanitation services, community collaboration and development, economic relief, and mobility. Ideally, residents’ answers would be aggregated and analyzed to determine what level of food and water insecurity slum dwellers have been dealing with, whether they have been offered and received government assistance during the pandemic, and how the lockdowns have impacted them. This survey has not yet been deployed.