Abstract
This paper describes the institutional framework that is needed to greatly increase the scale and effectiveness of government and aid agency initiatives to reduce poverty in Nairobi. The introduction outlines the scale of informal settlements within Nairobi (which now house more than half the city's population) and section II describes the economic and political conditions which allowed these settlements to grow but also to receive so little attention from governments and international agencies. Section III describes the development of an institutional strategy through which the agencies of government and international donors can work together and with the inhabitants of the informal settlements to address urban poverty, including improving housing conditions and basic service provision. Section IV summarizes the findings of the inventory of informal settlements on which this paper's recommendations are based and how it was undertaken.