Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI)
Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI) is the national support NGO formed by Tanzanians with a desire of providing technical and financial assistance to the community living in informal settlements and the Tanzania Urban Poor Federation (TUPF).
CCI, established in 2004, facilitates processes that develop organizational capacity at the local level and promote pro-poor policy and practice in Tanzania urban development focus.
CCI strives to create inclusive cities with united and empowered communities of the urban poor who have the capacity to voice, promote, and negotiate for their collective interests. In partnership with organized communities of the urban poor,
CCI Tanzania works to increase access to secure land tenure, adequate shelter, and provision of basic services such as water and sanitation for the slum communities and public services. The key to these services is innovation in terms of technologies and affordable costs to ensure sustainability.
MISSION, VISION AND APPROACH
Our Primary approach
For achieving these aims is to support the development of a strong and active urban poor federation. Support takes the form of establishment of savings schemes; community resource mobilization and organization; conduction of enumeration and mapping; exchange visits; partnership support, technical assistance, capacity-building, leadership and management support, outreach, advocacy, action oriented research and documentation.
Our Mission.
CCI’s mission is to build the capacity of the communities from the urban poor to initiate sustainable development that improve their livelihoods
Vision.
CCI aspires to create a fair and inclusive cities where communities from the urban poor will unite be empowered with skills to effectively negotiate from their collective interests and priorities.
Where We Work
Centre for Community Initiatives (CCI) is an organization that has an urban poverty agenda working and organizes communities living in informal settlements in urban areas of 8 cities in Tanzania. The cities are Dar-es-Salaam in all Municipalities, Morogoro, Dodoma, Mwanza, Mara, Arusha, Tanga and Zanzibar. The expansion of urban poor support programmes continues depending on the needs and available resources.
Why the Urban poor in Informal settlements?
Tanzania in particular has the third highest slum growth rate in Africa, over 6% per year, and the sixth largest slum population with over 6 million people living in slums. Marginalized from life and opportunity in the formal city, the urban poor are in many ways invisible to many urban development agendas which have ended up many living in poor condition with lack of land tenure, poor housing, threat to evictions, Lack of water and poor sanitation. For a quite long period of time, slum dwellers have always expected the Government authorities to intervene and address their challenges without any successes.
CCI works with the urban poor with the primary mechanism of empowering the community to innovate new mechanism of engaging with the state in order to ensure that their needs and demands are addressed. The urban poor need to prioritize their own demands and articulate their aspirations to become critical actors in transforming cities by identifying their needs and planning for affordable and viable solutio
