[Quote:]

For more than a decade the community of Porta Farm has struggled to assert their right to housing. In June 2005 that struggle effectively ended when heavily armed police forcibly evicted them and destroyed their homes.

The destruction of Porta Farm left thousands, including children and the elderly homeless, destitute and traumatized. They joined the hundreds of thousands of other victims of the government’s Operation Murambatsvina – a countrywide programme of mass forced evictions and demolitions of homes and informal businesses. The UN has estimated that in six weeks between May and July 2005, 700,000 people across Zimbabwe lost their homes, their livelihoods, or both.

Porta Farm settlement was established in 1991by the Zimbabwe government to provide a temporary home to thousands of people forcibly evicted from informal dwellings around Harare as part of a “clean-up campaign” in preparation for a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. They were told that their stay at Porta Farm would be temporary and they would be permanently resettled elsewhere. While some families were resettled, others were not and Porta Farm grew as other victims of forced evictions around Harare arrived in the hope of a permanent solution.

To download a high resolution version of the images below, please click on the image

Before	After
© Digital Globe, Inc.	© Digital Globe, Inc.
Satellite image of Porta Farm, Zimbabwe, 22 June 2002	Satellite image of Porta Farm, Zimbabwe, 6 April 2006