Nishi Shah, Megan Yeager, Jessica Hughes, Maddie Hill, Tom Miner

 A shanty town is a slum settlement, mostly illegal and impoverished people who live in dwellings made from scrap materials, often plywood, corrugated, metal and sheets of plastic.  Shanty towns are mostly found in developing nations or partially developed nations with an unequal distribution of wealth.  Shanty towns came into existence because groups of lower class citizens grouped together, creating these so called slums

 Being a communal type of people, they tend to congregate in areas.  Usually a patch of land between suburbs or vacant plots in industrial zones.  Their building materials are anything that comes to hand. Broken bits of board, plastic sheeting, rusty corrugated iron, mud, and used bricks. Out of these, they construct small, one roomed shacks, in close proximity to each other. Roofing material is held in place by bricks, tubs of stones, old car tires and logs.  The settlement sizes vary from clusters of thirty to sprawls of several thousand

 There's no refuse collection, no road access. People are exposed to, and dying from, shack fires. Unemployment is rife. There are communities where there are only one or two water taps for over 10,000 people. And the average number is five. The toilets are pits, not flushable, and there are only around five per 5,000 people.  Most of the people who have jobs work as cleaners in rich houses or as street traders, selling clothes  Instead, conditions have worsened after South Africa hit its biggest recession in 17 years. More than a million people remain living in shacks and over 23% of the country is unemployed

 The conditions in the Shanty Towns of South Africa are nearly unbearable as many struggle to stay alive day to day. The average age of a male living in the area is between the ages of fourteen to twenty-five. For females, it’s the same.   Unbearable living conditions are a main cause of death in this area, along with the wide spread of aids still growing and killing many every day. Unsafe water, food, and other factors are also to blame for the ongoing death in the shanty towns.  -Population Growth: %  -Birth Rate: births/1,000 population  -Death Rates: deaths/1,000 population

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