Project Highlights Human Needs in Slums

Doctors Without Borders worked with photographers to document living conditions in urban slums. Doctors Without Borders worked with photographers to document living conditions in urban slums.

December 4, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute

Urban Survivors, a new multimedia project, seeks to highlight the urgent humanitarian crisis and medical needs of people living in slums. Rapid urbanization has brought a sharp increase in the number of people living in such abject conditions—one in 10 people worldwide.

Doctors Without Borders collaborated with the NOOR photo agency and Darjeeling Productions to create the site, which features online documentaries about conditions in five cities.

The videos aren’t easy to watch. An illegal immigrant living in Johannesburg talks about the reason he fled Zimbabwe: a politically motivated attack during which assailants set him on fire. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, a rickshaw puller who has already lost several children to disease describes his infant son’s struggle to gain weight.

“We want to put a human face on the humanitarian emergency that exists in many slums around the world,” Loris De Filippi, operational director at the charity, said in a written statement.

To get there: Go to http://www.urbansurvivors.org.

About the Author

NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.