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For Release Sunday, April 11, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

Could it be that African and Indian slum dwellers are more civically conscious than millions of Americans?

There’s an amazing “self-enumeration” effort under way continents away from us — and more about that in a moment.

But first: What’s happening with Americans and their decennial Census? Why did close to half of us ignore the Census Bureau’s first query?

We ought to be enthusiastic supporters. We live in one of the richest nations on earth. We enjoy many liberties, while benefitting from defenses against enemy attack and provision of public safety in our communities. Schools, roadways, environmental protection, Social Security — the list of services is almost endless.

Government needs accurate Census numbers to apportion congressional seats among the states. It uses the count to determine the yearly distribution of some $400 billion in government program funds. And the count’s used to make major decisions on where we put schools, build roads, bridges and transit. The figures matter a lot for essential services we all tap, and for everyone’s neighborhood.

But by April 1, only 48 percent of Americans had bothered to mail in their Census forms.

Why?

Census Director Robert Groves generously attributes the lethargic response to procrastination — Americans, he notes, “are a busy lot” and easily put the form aside.

And it’s true, there are other barriers: the Census is being conducted in 59 languages, but even that leaves out twice as many tongues spoken somewhere in America. And then there’s fear of some illegal immigrants that the information might be used to deport them — even though surveys show that about 80 percent of Hispanics, at least, know that the Census Bureau, by law, must keep their personal information confidential.

Still, the bureau is now having to hire 700,000 enumerators to go door to door to find and count millions of stragglers — at a cost, for each name of $62, versus a mere 41 cents for a mail response.

Contrast that picture with self-help enumerations being conducted by slum dwellers in such spots as Pune (India), Nairobi (Kenya) or Durban (South Africa).

My friend David Smith of the non-profit Affordable Housing Institute, an inveterate and always interesting blogger, describes a recent scene in an “informal settlement” — tiny, self-built houses of sun-baked adobe and wattle on unplotted land, located on a hillside on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa’s third largest city.

The visitors, including representatives of Slum Dwellers International — a key player in self-enumeration efforts in Africa and Asia — are greeted by a chorus of women singing spiritedly (in Zulu):

“We are despoiling our beautiful country with our ugly houses, and we want houses as beautiful as our country.”

The orator of the day is Patrick Magabhula of uTschani, a leading South African non-profit supporting better housing for its nation’s poorest. Magabhula speaks in passionate terms of the peoples’ desire for decent housing, to be part of the city. “Today,” he says, “we will be counted. Today is the beginning.”

The enumeration — the peoples’ self-census — is accomplished by the neighborhood’s own residents, using low-tech tools to size houses, rooms, streets and land plots, collecting information from every household in a standardized way.

It’s taken months to persuade Durban’s city government to acknowledge, albeit grudgingly, that the official estimate of people living on this hillside was too low. Now the government has observers on hand to assure validity of the peoples’ own count — a bit like election monitoring.

The results will make a difference in two significant ways. First, South Africa grants subsidies for each new home constructed. The law historically helped formal housing projects; but now with peoples’ self-enumeration, it becomes a tool for the poorest of the poor to get help building their own homes.

Second, across the developing world there is a familiar pattern of cities leaving slum areas — since they lack formal title — blank on municipal maps. This means the slums are easily denied equitable services– roads, water, sanitation, schools and more. But when there’s been a people’s census, the official injustice becomes harder to perpetuate.

The monitored self-census, notes Smith, is a little like a real estate closing: “Information becomes part of the legal reality. The city has now taken cognizance of this neighborhood, its people, and their property. Enumeration is the inauguration of urban citizenship.”

A people’s census has an inherent advantage: When neighbors come to count, people instinctively cooperate; if it’s outsiders, they may see “officialdom” and run and hide.

Still, the rising tide of peoples’ censuses to aid the world’s hard-pressed new city dwellers is an exciting story of self-empowerment. It’s a reminder of how rights must always be fought for. And it’s dramatic evidence of how some the poorest people on the planet are showing a grasp of self-government that escapes America’s hoards of census “no shows.”

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.