quick guides for policy makers 6 community-based organizations the poor as agents of development.pdf

8/9/2019 Quick Guides for Policy Makers 6 COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS The poor as agents of development.pdf

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Q U I C K G U I D E S

F O RP O L I C Y

M A K E R S

COMMUNITY-BASED

ORGANIZATIONS: The poor asagents of development6

cities

housingthe

in Asian

poorUnited Nations

ESCAP


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Copyright © United Nations Human Settlements Programme andUnited Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic, 2008

ISBN: 978-92-113-1945-3HS/958/08E Housing the Poor in Asian Cities, Quick Guide 6

DISCLAIMERThe designations employed and the presentation of material in this publication do not imply the expressionof any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status ofany country, territory, city or area or its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundariesregarding its economic system or degree of development. The analysis, conclusions and recommendationsof this publication do not necessarily reect the views of United Nations or its member States. Excerpts may

be reproduced without authorization, on condition that the source is indicated.

Cover design by Tom Kerr, ACHR and printed in Nairobi by the United Nations Ofce at Nairobi

Cover photo by Asian Coalition for Housing Rights

The publication of the Housing the Poor in Asian Cities series was made possible through the nancial supportof the Dutch Government and the Development Account of the United Nations.

Published by:United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic (UNESCAP)

Rajdamnern Nok AvenueBangkok 10200, ThailandFax: (66-2) 288 1056/1097E-mail: [email protected]: www.unescap.org

and

United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT)P.O.Box 30030 GPO 00100Nairobi, KenyaFax: (254-20) 7623092E-mail: [email protected]: www.unhabitat.org


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iQUICK GUIDES FOR POLICY MAKERS 6, COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS

Acknowledgements

This set of seven Quick Guides have been prepared as a result of an expert group meeting

on capacity-building for housing the urban poor, organized by UNESCAP in Thailandin July 2005. They were prepared jointly by the Poverty and Development Division ofUNESCAP and the Training and Capacity Building Branch (TCBB) of UN-HABITAT, withfunding from the Development Account of the United Nations and the Dutch Governmentunder the projects “Housing the Poor in Urban Economies” and “Strengthening NationalTraining Capabilities for Better Local Governance and Urban Development” respectively. An accompanying set of posters highlighting the key messages from each of the QuickGuides and a set of self-administered on-line training modules are also being developedunder this collaboration.

The Quick Guides were produced under the overall coordination of Mr. Adnan Aliani, Povertyand Development Division, UNESCAP and Ms. Åsa Jonsson, Training and Capacity BuildingBranch, UN-HABITAT with vital support and inputs from Mr. Yap Kioe Sheng, Mr. Raf Tutsand Ms. Natalja Wehmer. Internal reviews and contributions were also provided by Ms.Clarissa Augustinus, Mr. Jean-Yves Barcelo, Mr. Selman Erguden, Mr. Solomon Haile, Mr.Jan Meeuwissen, Mr. Rasmus Precht, Ms. Lowie Rosales, and Mr. Xing Zhang.

The Guides were prepared by Mr. Thomas A. Kerr, Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR)based on documents prepared by Mr. Babar Mumtaz, Mr. Michael Mattingly and Mr. Patrick

Wakely, formerly of the Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College of London; Mr.Yap Kioe Sheng, UNESCAP; Mr. Aman Mehta, Sinclair Knight Merz Consulting; Mr. PeterSwan, Asian Coalition for Housing Rights; and Mr. Koen Dewandeler, King Mongkut Instituteof Technology, Thailand.

The original documents and other materials can be accessed at: www.housing-the-urban-poor.net.

The above contributions have all shaped the Quick Guide series, which we hope will con-tribute to the daily work of policy makers in Asia in their quest to improve housing for the

urban poor.


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ii QUICK GUIDES FOR POLICY MAKERS 6, COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS

Contents

C O N D I T I O N S

C O N C E P T S

A P P R O A C H E S

T O O L S & G U I D E L I N E S

R E S O U R C E S

Poor communities: An untapped resource in Asian cities ........................................... 2

A long history of self-reliance........................................................................................ 3

Community organizations: The real and the fake ones ................................................ 4

Stirring many pots......................................................................................................... 5

From confrontation to negotiation, and from resistance to collaboration ...................... 6

A word from community organizations: “We can speak for ourselves” ......................... 7

Community participation: from full ownership to manipulation ..................................... 8

Partnership: How community organizations are helping their governments solve

problems of land, housing, basic services and poverty in Asian cities ........................9

Partnership with community organizations in housing ................................................ 10

Partnership with community organizations in resettlement ....................................... 12

Partnership with community organizations in upgrading ............................................ 14

Partnership with community organizations in housing nance .................................. 16

Partnership with community organizations in sanitation ............................................. 18Partnership with community organizations in infrastructure ....................................... 20

Partnership with community organizations in disaster rehabilitation .......................... 22

6 tools which communities use to build their organizations ........................................ 24

Community Development Funds ................................................................................ 34

10 ways to support community organizations ............................................................. 36

Books, articles, publications and websites ................................................................. 37


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1QUICK GUIDES FOR POLICY MAKERS 6, COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS

Community-based

organizations: The pooras agents of development

Q U I C K G U I D E F O R P O L I C Y M A K E R S N U M B E R 6

“It is vital that in the long run, communitiesof the poor, as the main group seeking

social justice, own and manage their owndevelopment process, and become central

to its renement and expansion.”

Sheela Patel, SPARC, India

The emergence of community organizations of the poor in Asia has been a very importantdevelopment during the past two decades. As structures which allow poor households

and poor communities to move from isolation and powerlessness into collective strength,these organizations have become powerful development mechanisms in their countries— and they belong entirely to people.

Besides providing a means of idea-sharing, asset-pooling and mutual support, communityorganizations create channels for poor people to talk to their local and national governmentsand to undertake collaborative development projects in housing, upgrading, land tenure,infrastructure and livelihood. Asia’s poor communities are increasingly delivering housingand community improvements, in collaboration with other development stakeholders.

Community organizations can be valuable and resourceful partners when it comes tonding viable housing solutions for the poor. Community organizations must play a central

role in nding solutions to their own housing problems. Understanding how they develop,

how they function and what tools they use is of great value to policy makers, especially inthe context of increasing decentralization. This guide introduces these aspects of Asia’scommunity organizations.

This guide is not aimed at specialists, but aims to help build the capacities of nationaland local government ofcials and policy makers who need to quickly enhance their

understanding of low-income housing issues.

P H O T O : S P A R C


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2 QUICK GUIDES FOR POLICY MAKERS 6, COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS

Poor communities: An untapped resource in Asian citiesThe urban poor are the designers, builders andsuppliers of the majority of affordable housing in Asia’s cities. Their self-help efforts have donewhat decades of government housing pro-grammes, formal-sector development projects,housing rights campaigns and international

development interventions have failed to do: toprovide most of the urban poor with shelter andbasic services, at prices they can afford and inlocations and arrangements which meet theirimmediate basic needs — right now when theyneed it, not in the distant future.

These informal systems for supplying housingand services in poor and informal settlementsare not ideal, largely “illegal”, often inequitable

and sub-standard in many ways. But they repre-sent a reasonable response to urgent necessity,where no alternatives exist. In this evidence ofhuman resourcefulness, there is a remarkableindependence, and self-generating vitality whichis one of the great, untapped sources of energyin Asian cities.

Governments have tended to look at slums and

informal settlements as a serious problem to bereckoned with, as blights on the urban landscape,as dens of anti-social elements or as evidence of

civic misbehavior which should be punished. Butover the past two decades, many governmentsand policy makers have taken a second look atinformal settlements — and the poor communi-ties who make them — and are recognizing theconstructive role these communities (and their

organizations) are playing in nding large-scale,lasting solutions to city-wide problems of land,housing and livelihood.

Most Asian cities have a long, grim history ofhousing project failures: social housing de-velopments that ended up housing the wrongtarget group, pilot projects that never scaledup, sites-and-services schemes where nobodywants to live and relocation projects abandoned

to speculators.Many governments and housing professionalsare realizing that these top-down projects, whichwere designed without much involvement of thepoor they were meant to serve, are never goingto solve the growing problems. And they’re alsorealizing that when poor community organizationsare at the centre of the planning and implementingof housing and development programmes whichaffect them, these programmes are more likelyto be successful.

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“One thing that we have learned over theyears is that neither doom-and-gloomscenarios nor destructive criticism will inspire people and governments to act. What is

needed is a positive vision, a clear road map

for getting from here to there, and a clearresponsibility assigned to each of the manyactors in the system.”

Former UN Secretary General Ko Annan

P H O T O : U N E S C A P


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A long history of self-reliance C O N

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relationships with local politicians and govern-

ment agencies to get the things they need in the

settlement. This is how community organization

begins, but it is almost never easy.

Most of the community organizations that

emerged in Asian cities in the 1960s and 1970s

were formed without any intervention or support

from local authorities or government agencies.

On the contrary, most local authorities were

reluctant to negotiate with community organiza-

tions, since any ofcial collaboration with “illegal”

occupants of land might be seen as bestowingon the slum-dwellers some degree of legitimacy.

In those days, not many local or national govern-

ment agencies were inclined to offer assistance

to poor communities or to seek their cooperation

in implementing their various social or physical

development initiatives.

As a result, the settlements were left more or

less on their own, and if improvements in their

housing or living environments were made, it

was usually by the communities themselves, and

usually in isolation from existing programmes or

government housing agency agendas.

Self-reliance is the basis for most aspects of

how urban poor communities are formed, how

their residents get land to settle on, how they

build, buy or rent houses, how they get access

to water supply and electricity, how they pave

their swampy walkways, how they get loans in

cases of emergency, how they nd jobs and how

they survive in a city that offers them very little

help. A poor settlement which may look chaotic

to an outsider, is in reality an extremely complex

eld of compromise, mutual support, mutual

dependence and resourcefulness from all itsdifferent residents, who are often dependent

on each other.

If an informal community is able to stay in the

same place and is not evicted for many years, it’s

likely that the community will gradually improve

and consolidate: housing and living conditions

will improve, support structures will deepen

and collective systems for resolving needs and

problems within the community will get stron-

ger. Many communities develop considerable

capacities to organize themselves, collaborate

with other organizations and develop pragmatic

For as long as human beings havebeen around, they have organizedthemselves into communities in orderto survive, and in order to collectivelymeet needs which they can’t meetas individuals: physical, emotional,economic, security and cultural needs.

This collective self-reliance is verymuch alive today in Asia’s urban poorcommunities.


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Community organizations:the real and the fake ones After a few prominent success stories in the

1970s and 80s, involving path-breaking collabo-

rations between community organizations and

government housing programmes, “community

participation” became the new buzzword. More

and more development projects in Asia weredesigned with the precondition that community

organizations had to be partners in the project.

In many of these projects, no community orga-

nization was yet in place, so new ones had to

be hastily formed.

In most instances, these brand-new communityorganizations turned out to be pretty weak becausetheir only purpose was to comply with project rules,

or to ensure that the community members made“cost-sharing” contributions in cash or labour. Sincethese community organizations were last-minuteadd-ons to projects that were conceived and imple-mented without much real community involvement,most of the projects failed. And when they failed,it was invariably the community residents whogot the blame.

In many of these “top-down” kinds of projects, thegovernment ofcials and support professionals

leading the process had no real interest inunderstanding or engaging with communities,or building their capacities through the processof project design, planning and implementation.The participation of these new, project-created

community organizations was limited to a rubber-stamping of conventional housing deliveryprogrammes which had been all worked out inadvance, and were expected to go ahead withoutany signicant modications to accommodate the

resident’s priorities, needs or nancial capacities.

And that is one of the surest ways to ensure thatcommunity organizations never mature.

Real community organizations that aregrounded in a common struggle to meet poorpeople’s needs can be started in many differ-ent ways. They can start spontaneously, orthey can come out of eviction struggles. Theycan even start through an NGO intervention orwithin a big development project. But whetherthese community organizations can grow intothe real kind, or remain token organizations

with no substance or strength, depends onhow genuine people’s participation is.

The real kind of communityparticipation:

If project organizers can adopt

open-ended and exible design and

implementation strategies through

all aspects of their developmentprojects, even newly-formed

community organizations can grow

along with the project, and the

outcomes will almost certainly be

physically more appropriate and

socially more sustainable. P H O T O : C O D I


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thing carefully until it’s perfect, and then replicat-ing it. When big and small pots in many differentplaces are all simmering away on their separatefires, pot-watching can help create enoughmomentum to keep community organizationsgrowing and active.

Stirring many pots is also a means for accom-modating the widely varied needs that existwithin any poor community, where men, women,children, youth and elderly may, for example,have different needs and levels of poverty. Themore activities there are, the more room theycreate for new leaders to emerge, for new peopleto get involved in things they’re passionateabout, and for power within the community to

be spread out among lots of people — throughactive involvement. When they open opportuni-ties for people to get involved, these differentactivities also provide an opportunity to releasetensions and frustrations which always exist insituations of poverty.Source: ACHR

Real change doesn’t happen over night. It cantake a very long time. This is something thatmost development interventions and formalhousing programmes don’t acknowledge. Find-ing lasting solutions to urban poverty and hous-ing takes patience and requires staying power incommunity organizations. Many people in poorcommunities have to want to change the situ-ation, and that scale of common wanting can’tbe achieved until they have tangible evidencethat change is possible.

In the past, many good community organizationshave been formed and grown strong in theirunited response to a single, critical problem (likeeviction), but then weakened once that problem

was resolved. If a community organizationdepends on a single issue, one crisis, or onepilot project to sustain its mobilization process,that puts too much pressure on that issue to beresolved or that pilot to be successful, or peoplewill lose heart and the organization will collapse.

A healthy, strong community organization needstime to develop, and develops best when itkeeps busy addressing many different needs,on many different fronts, and in several ways— at the same time.

Sheela Patel, with the Indian NGO SPARC,describes this necessity for activities on manyfronts as“stirring many pots”. While you wait forone pot to be ready, another might be boilingover, ready to take off the re. There is always

something ready to keep the excitement and

enthusiasm going, even while other pots maystill be cold. This is very different from doing one

“Stirring many pots”Many community organizations are learning that the secret of

keeping their movements alive is working on many fronts and

initiating many activities at the same time

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From confrontation to negotiation, and

from resistance to collaboration

Community movements that were born in strugglesagainst eviction have transformed themselves into pro-active leaders in a process of nding solutions

to housing problems in their cities.

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4Many of Asia’s urban community movementswere born in re, through resistance to evictions.

The threat of eviction has prompted groups of thepoor to come together and organize themselvesto protect their settlements. This focus on a com-mon crisis helped increase people’s awareness

of their shared predicament as illegal occupantsof somebody else’s land, and their common needfor decent, secure housing. These strugglesto defend their homes and livelihoods againsteviction caused many things to happen in poorcommunities:

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They helped build trust, commitment,democratic decision-making systems and

P H O T O : A C H R

These struggles pushed people into

a better understanding of the cities

They brought community members

into contact with wider networks of

They helped people to develop effec-

tive decision-making structures and

which marginalize them, the legal systems which

criminalize them, and the housing rights whichare denied them.

people and organizations who were sympatheticto their struggle.

to generate capable and responsible leadershipwithin their community organizations.

cooperation among community members.

All meant stronger, more sophisticated commu-nity organizations, better equipped to campaigncreatively and negotiate effectively with the same

authorities who used to demolish their houses.What began for these embattled communities asa short-term, defensive response to a crisis,gradually grew into a more proactive process

of focusing on the longer-term goal of secure

housing, through preparation, dialogue and

negotiation.

Although the evictions kept happening and poor

people continued to be thrown out of their settle-ments in the city, the work of several long, difcult

eviction struggles eventually resulted in somebig breakthroughs in land tenure and housingfor the poor. These became precedents for othercommunities and other cities to emulate. And inturn, these precedent-setting alternatives showedlocal governments and communities that workingtogether (instead of against one another) can leadto lasting housing solutions that work for everyone:for the poor and for the city they are part of.


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“Stand behind us, not in front.We can speak for ourselves.”

NGOs can be vital allies to people’s organiza-tions by providing them back-up support indifferent ways. NGOs can also be a valuablelink between the formal systems and the reali-ties, common sense and confusion that con-stitutes poor people’s lives. But the word fromstrong community organizations to their NGOpartners is this: “We can speak for ourselves.

Stand behind us, not in front of us. The mainthing is to strengthen the people’s process, not

to manipulate it or create dependency.”

NGOs have played a big role in helpingpoor communities in many Asian countriesto organize themselves into self-managedorganizations with enough capacity and scaleto address all kinds of problems they face, fromland and housing, to access to basic services,

to issues of health and welfare and betteremployment opportunities. There are still afew countries where autonomous community

organizations (and their NGO supporters) areperceived as a threat to national stability andkept under tight control. But in most Asiancountries, NGOs have had the freedom to allythemselves with community organizations, andthese NGO-community alliances have led tosome of the most exciting and ground-breakingsolutions to the problems of urban housing and

poverty (more in the “Partnerships” sectionslater in this guide).

In the last two decades, NGOs have beenincreasingly accepted as key actors in the newpartnerships that have allowed governmentsand local authorities to enter into dialogue and

joint ventures with community organizations onissues of poverty alleviation, housing and basicservices. But even so, it is important for NGOs

to resist the habit of dominating or speaking onbehalf of their community partners — and thisis not always an easy thing to do.

The only constant:

Projects come and go, NGOs leave

or change focus, donor grants dry up,

development paradigms come in andout of fashion, professionals move on,

governments change and bureaucrats

get transferred. The degree of ux in the

development world is unsettling but a fact.

The only constant is the poor communities

themselves. After millions have been spent

and the consultants have gone home,

people will still be needing a secure place to

live, a job, a toilet and a water tap.

Source: ACHR

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Community participation: from fullownership to manipulation

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There are all kinds of ways that communities can participate in the process of resolving problemsof land, housing, livelihood and access to basic services. As the ones who face these problemsdirectly they have the greatest understanding of these problems and the most powerful motivationto solve them. Despite this, a lot of NGOs, development organizations and government agencies donot fully consult them and seek to impose their own ideas through projects and programmes, withcommunities being allowed to participate only in fairly insignicant ways. Similarly, representative

democrary is not always fully participatory with enough room for consultation with communities bylocally-elected leaders. In fact, community participation can take many forms:

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Participation through full ownership: Communities are in control of decision-makingand the government enters into initiatives as required by the community. In this form of

participation, government responds and supports, rather than leads the process, and the com-munity manages, implements and controls the initiatives it has designed itself, according to needsand priorities it has identied.

Participation through cooperation: Here, the government and communities cooperateon working towards a shared goal, with a strong form of community decision-making, often

facilitated by NGOs. Communities are involved at an early stage, and vulnerable groups within

communities (often women) are encouraged to take part.

Participation through consultation: The participation of communities is sought withgood intention, usually by organizing forums which give people a chance to share their

views on a planned intervention. Even if the decision-making and information is controlled by anoutside agency, the project may be adapted in the process to more closely suit local needs, basedon what comes up in these forums. Communities may not have much control, but allowing themto at least voice their opinions gives the project some degree of accountability.

Participation through information: It may look like the community is participating, butthey are only being given information about what is going to happen, whether they like itor not. People have no room to express their opinions or inuence change, and the process is

usually not transparent. The objective of this kind of “participation” is usually to reduce potentialresistance to a project (such as giving up community land for road-widening).

Participation through manipulation: In this form of participation, communities are onlyincluded for exploitative reasons. There is no participatory decision-making, and communi-

ties are used mainly for political gains, free labour, cost recovery or to meet donor conditions.

Source: Adapted from Plummer, 2000


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Partnership: 7 ways poor communityorganizations are helping their govern-ments solve problems of land, housing,

basic services and poverty in Asian citiesat your disposal. If the skills housed in these

community organizations can build cities, they

can also be channeled to improve the lives of

those large populations in Asia’s cities which

have been left out.

Partnership between government agencies and

poor communities is new. When governmentagencies can step back and do only what com-munities and people can’t do by themselves, itrequires adjustments in administrative attitudesand mind-sets on both sides. But this kind ofpartnership, and the devolution of control that itinvolves, represents a strategy for governmentsto achieve genuine decentralization and the fullparticipation of poor people in the programmes

which affect their lives.In many Asian cities, poor community organiza-tions are now involved in large-scale partnershipinitiatives with their cities and other actors to nd

effective, lasting and replicable solutions to theseproblems. The outcomes of these partnershipscomprise some of the most innovative and excit-ing work happening in development today. These

projects show that cities and poor communitiescan work together, and that it’s better for everyonewhen they do.

The problems of the poor are problems of the whole cityThis is not only a matter of equity, or rights, but of fundamental urban equations. All parts of a cityare interconnected. If the city’s infrastructure, for example, allows soil and garbage from half thecity’s population to ow into the river untreated, that’s not only bad news for the under-servicedpoor, it’s bad news for the city as a whole. When you plan for poor people’s land, housing and

basic services, it’s good for the whole city.Source: ACHR

The problems of land, housing and services in Asian cities are too big and too complex for eithercommunities, governments, cities or developmentagencies to solve alone. Good solutions to theseproblems that reach the scale of need requirepartnership, but partnership isn’t easy. Especiallybetween the poor and the state, who have a long

history of mutual distrust to get over.

One of the principles of any good partnership isnding a way that each partner does what it does

best and letting the others do what they do best,so the parts all add up to a workable whole. Thiskind of problem-solving is many sided and makesfor some of the best solutions. But partnershiptakes time, and can only be developed through

practice.There are many things which poor people cando better and more efciently than the state.

Informal communities already contain all the

expertise that goes into building cities: masons,

carpenters, plumbers, electricians, laborers.

When you add the condence, skills, scale,

innovation and organizational capacities which

Asia’s community organizations have built, re-ned and scaled up in the past two decades, you

have an enormous problem-solving resource

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Partnership with community

organizations in housing1

The city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, makes a goodexample of how a partnership between organizedpoor communities and their district, municipal andnational governments (with support from UPDF,the local community development fund) can createopportunities to provide decent, secure housing for

the city’s poorest citizens — in a context whereeviction was once the only housing strategy.

It is hard to imagine a more difcult context than the

one in which this partnership emerged. Decades ofwar, political upheaval and unspeakable hardshiphave torn communities apart in Cambodia, scat-tered people across the country and obliteratedlinks with the past. As the country gets back on

its feet and money pours into it’s economy, poormigrants from the provinces are drawn to the cityfor jobs in the new factories, on the constructionsites and in the burgeoning service and tourismsectors.

For the poor, Phnom Penh is a city of hope andopportunity, but when it comes to nding decent,

affordable places to live, most have no option butto build shacks in the city’s 550-odd informal settle-ments, on open land, and along roadsides, railwaytracks, canals and rivers, where conditions areunhealthy and insecure. And as the city develops,pressure on urban land is increasingly bringingabout conicts between the poor communities

and commercial interests — conicts which have

brought about very large-scale evictions.

Cambodia, unlike its neighbours Thailand and

Vietnam, still has no formal support systems forthe poor: no housing board, no ministry of hous-

Partnership in practice:

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ing, no legislative mechanisms for regularizinginformal settlements, no government programmesto provide basic services or to support people’sefforts to improve conditions in their settlements.

There is almost no housing nance to any sector— poor or middle class. And the municipality, whichhas been overburdened with challenges such asood control, crime and economic development,

has had difculty responding to the needs of the

city’s growing poor population.

Since 1998, the network of urban poor sav-

ings groups has worked with their district

and ward ofcials to develop housing andsettlement improvement projects in nearly

a third of the city’s poor communities. With

modest housing loans and upgrading

grants from UPDF, these communities

have planned, built, managed and paid for

3,000 houses in 108 communities — all in a

city with no other options for poor people’s

housing.

Source: UPDF/ACHR

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Housing partnership in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The people design and build their own houses and new settlement.

The municipality and Prime Minister pay for the new land.

UPDF provides soft housing loans and infrastructure subsidies.

LAND: The 2-hectares of land the peoplefound, just 2 kms away, was bought from

For 15 years, a community of poor households had squatted on land at Prek Toel, next to PhnomPenh’s garbage dump in Mean Cheay District. Most earned their living gathering, sorting and sellingrecyclable waste on the dump (including children) earning $1–$2 per day. Living conditions werebad: no toilets, drainage or roads, and serious ooding. When the community faced eviction in

2003, Phnom Penh’s community network helped them start a daily savings group and begin lookingfor land nearby which they could eventually buy. Through the savings network, the municipality

heard about the case and agreed to support the people’s self-help housing efforts and buy nearbyland for resettlement, which the people could choose.

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a closed-down factory. So besides the land, theygot an old factory building, which the communitynow uses for a pre-school and community cen-tre. The land cost $120,000, of which $40,000

came from the Prime Minister and $80,000 fromthe Municipality. All 159 households (826 people)moved to the new land in July 2003. The peoplewill get individual land title after staying therefor ve years.

SETTLEMENT DESIGN: With help from young architects at UPDF, the residents developeda settlement layout with a playground, community centre, collective garbage recycling

workshop and 159 house plots (72 square metres each), to house the original 116 households

from Prek Toel, and another 43 households who’d been evicted nearby.HOUSES: 59 households took housing loans from UPDF of between $200 and $500, whichthey repay in monthly, weekly or daily repayments, according to their earning pattern. Others

built their houses using materials such as recycled timber and tin sheets from their old housesand will upgrade them gradually.

INFRASTRUCTURE: With a modest upgrading grant from UPDF and UN-HABITAT, theresidents laid 866 metres of graveled roads, built two drainage lines, set up a sewing centre

and built a few shared toilets. Shared water taps were provided by the municipality. The resident’s

next step is to concrete the roads and plant trees.Source: www.achr.net


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Partnership with communityorganizations in resettlement2

The project is supposed to provide “in town” re-location for households affected by the project’ssouthern and northern components, so peopledon’t have to move far away. Because the Philip-pine National Railway is a public-private company,relocating affected households (which is not cov-ered in the project budget) is not the task of therailways. Although the National Housing Authorityis overseeing the resettlement process, each mu-

nicipality the railway passes through (each withits own policies and politics) is responsible for therelocation within their own boundaries.

In the resettlement package people get:

Serviced land pots (40 square metres) at asubsidized cost of US$ 2,200, which coversthe cost of developing concrete roads, drains,electricity and water supply in the new areas.

Housing materials worth $870 plus $220cash for labour.

Loans: The serviced plots, building materialsand labour budget are all given to people ona cost-recovery basis. The total amount of$3,290 will have to be repaid in 30 years at6% annual interest, in monthly payments.

The resettlement of several thousand householdsto make way for the much-needed expansion ofthe railway tracks in Metro Manila makes a good

example of how resettlement can cause less

disruption to the poor if community organizations

are key partners in the process.

When in 1997 the government launched a

mega-project to expand and improve Manila’s

railway tracks for transport and cargo, the idea

was welcomed in a city choked with trafc

jams and pollution. But because the project

required all the land within 15 metres of the

tracks, 80,000 households living in slums along

the tracks found themselves under threat of

eviction.

At rst, the Asian Development Bank was to

provide loans to the Philippines Government for

the project, but later withdrew when it becameclear that the enormous cost of resettling all

the affected households properly would make

the project impossible. After the ADB withdrew,

a Chinese government consortium (with no

stringent resettlement guidelines) stepped in

with nancing.

Railway slums:

About 200,000 poor households

live in informal settlements along

the railway tracks in Metro Manila,

where they carry on with all aspects

of their lives within metres of trains.

Nobody would choose to live in such

a dangerous situation, but for lack

of other affordable housing options,

these railway slum households have

remained for decades.

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Resettlement partnership in Manila, Philippines

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The Homeless Peoples Federation Philip-

pines (HPFP) is a national network of urbanpoor communities promoting community-driveninitiatives in land, shelter, basic services, liveli-hood and urban development processesinvolving vulnerable slum settlements. For manyyears, the federation has been supporting sav-ings groups in settlements along the southernrailway tracks in Muntinlupa, and since 2003has been working intensively with affected

railway settlements in all six of the municipalitiesinvolved in the North Rail project.

For the federation, eviction crises and naturalcalamities can often be powerful opportunitiesfor mobilizing poor communities to take chargeof planning a better, more secure future. Theforced resettlement of thousands of householdsunder the North Rail Project was just such

an opportunity: a chance to help transform apotentially nasty and poverty-enhancing forced

resettlement into a community-managed reloca-

tion process which works for people and is therst step in a comprehensive, long-term processof community-driven development.

In three municipalities, the railway settlementsalready had a strong coalition of their own, andit was this coalition that asked the HomelessPeople’s Federation for help. After helping railwaycommunities in three municipalities to set up sav-ings schemes and conduct detailed householdsurveys in all the affected settlements, theysupported the communities to begin a dialoguewith their local governments about the terms ofresettlement and the selection of new “in town”sites. They also set up resource centers in all themunicipalities and organized exchange visits,bringing community leaders to nearby Payatas fora 4-day training organized by poor communities

in saving and resettlement planning. Source: www.achr.net

“If we get a good relocation programme

working with one municipality, we can

use that success to inuence other

municipalities which had no plans for

relocation. It’s like a pilot relocation joint-venture. In some of these municipalities,

the people don’t know what’s happening

at all! But now the people from the

Bocaue Municipality are going to railway

settlements in other municipalities down

the line and telling people what’s up. In

this way, affected households are helping

other affected households, spreading the

information and building up a network in

the process.”

Ruby Papeleras, HPFP

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Partnership with communityorganizations in upgrading

3In 2003, the Thai Government announced anambitious policy to address the housing problemsof the country’s urban poor citizens. The BaanMankong Upgrading Programme channels

government funds, in the form of infrastructuresubsidies and soft housing loans, directly to poorcommunities, which plan and carry out improve-ments to their housing, environment and basicservices and manage the budget themselves.Instead of delivering housing to individual poorhouseholds, Baan Mankong lets Thailand’s slumcommunities do the work.

As part of this unconventional programme, which is

being implemented by the Community OrganizationsDevelopment Institute (CODI), communities of thepoor in 200 Thai cities are working in close collabo-ration with their local governments, professionals,universities and NGOs to survey all the settlementsin their cites and then plan an upgrading processwhich attempts to improve all the settlements inthat city, within ve years. Once these city-wide

plans are nalized, CODI channels the budget (both

infrastructure subsidies and housing loans) from thecentral government directly to communities.

One of Asia’s best examples of community-gov-ernment partnership is Thailand’s Baan MankongUpgrading Programme, which puts the country’sexisting slum communities (and their networks) at

the centre of a process of developing long-term,comprehensive solutions to problems of land andhousing in 200 Thai cities.

The National Housing Authority’s rst community

upgrading programme began in 1977 and wasthe Thai government’s rst attempt to bring basic

services to existing slums, regardless of theirtenure status. It was a breakthrough, because itshowed increasing acceptance of the idea thatletting people stay where they were already livingwas a viable alternative to eviction, if improve-ments could be made to those settlements. Butthose early upgrading programmes were plaguedwith problems of poor cost recovery, maintenanceand quality. The expensive, top-down approach todelivering basic services to the poor, in which asingle government organization did all the work,

with no community’s involvement, wasn’t able tocome even close to meeting the scale of need.

Capturing the energy:

Undertaking an upgrading programme on the scaleof Baan Mankong is something that is only possiblebecause most Thai cities already have large,active community networks ready to make gooduse of the opportunities the programme offers. The

programme represents a scaling-up and formalizingof the hard work these networks have been doingover the past ten years. Baan Mankong offers a

chance to capture and harness this energy andmake poor communities the agents of change, not just the passive beneciaries of development.

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Upgrading partnership in Bangkok, Thailand

Before: The Bang Bua communitiesbefore upgrading. The weak

wooden houses left people inconstant fear of res.

After: The new houses in Bang Bua aremostly built according to three

designs developed by the residentsto suit their needs and affordability.

About 3,800 poor households live in the 12slums which line Bangkok’s Bang Bua Canal.

After a century of living with the daily risk ofres and eviction, and facing constant accusa-tions of polluting the canal, the people livingalong the Bang Bua canal joined hands withthe Baan Mankong Programme to upgradetheir communities and secure their landtenure.

With good collaboration from the district authori-ties, a nearby university and CODI, the 12 BangBua communities formed a network, startedsavings groups, formed a cooperative societyand prepared plans for redeveloping their settle-ments and revitalizing their canal. In the process,the communities have become the city’s ally inrevitalizing this important canal.

With support from Bangkok’s city-wide networkof 200 canal-side communities, Bang Bua was

able to successfully negotiate a long-term leaseto the public land they occupy. Bang Bua con-vinced the authorities that redeveloping theircommunities in the same place is good for theresidents and good for the city as a whole. After

long negotiations, the residents bargained theTreasury Department down to a monthly land

rental rate of US$1–2 per household, depend-ing on the size of their house. Households paythe cooperative, which then makes a collectivepayment to the Treasury Department.

The rst three communities began rebuilding, inDecember 2004, and all 12 communities will befully upgraded within a few years.

Besides new houses and infrastructure in the 12

communities, the canal is also being improvedand a brand-new, tree-lined, 5-metre lane isbeing built along its edge, which will provideaccess to the settlements, space for childrento play, people to visit and vending carts to selltheir food and wares. The Bang Bua communi-ties hold regular canal-cleaning festivals, anduse organic compost and water plants to bringthe water in the canal back to life, and continue

to negotiate with upstream polluters to reducetoxic efuents in the canal. A community-man-aged “oating market” is also planned.

Source: CODI

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Partnership with community

organizations in housing finance4Cebu City, in southern Philippines, has been thesite of many precedent-setting slum redevelopment

and relocation schemes which have brought poorcommunities, the municipality, private businesses,landowners and NGOs together into a variety ofeffective partnerships. Cebu City makes a goodcase for how partnerships with poor communities

as the chief actors can resolve a city’s housingproblems bit by bit.

Informal settlements in Cebu are seldom evictedany more. A growing set of practical alternatives toeviction have been tested and become establishedoptions: land-sharing, land-swapping, buying-back,voluntary relocation and on-site redevelopment.It took years of building strong communities, a

municipal administration open to suggestion, anunconventionally-thinking set of NGOs and a city-wide capacity to forge working partnerships.

One of the most creative and energetic forces be-hind Cebu’s innovative approach towards the city’spoor communities has been thePagtambayayongFoundation. For 30 years, this NGO has workedwith poor communities, the municipality and otherNGOs on land acquisition, social housing, housingnance and affordable building materials. Pagt-ambayayong has been the originator for dozens

Pagtambayayong has demonstrated throughmany projects that when the housing needsof the city’s poor are met, it is good for the

whole city.

of Community Mortgage Programme (CMP)loans. Together with a strong network of NGOsand community organizations, Pagtambayayonghas struggled hard over the years to keep CMPalive by campaigning, nding ways to improve the

programme’s administration and expanding it’slending to reach more households. (See Quick

Guide 5 on Housing Finance).

A finance programme thatbelongs to the poorMany of the housing projects in Cebu were onlypossible because of the existence of the gov-ernment’s Community Mortgage Programme(CMP). Between 1993 and 1997, the CMP

provided low-interest loans without collateral(via originators and community associations)to 46,000 squatter households to buy landand regularize their situation. Unfortunatelyproblems of non-repayment have plagued thisinnovative programme, which is the country’sonly housing programme that directly reachesthe urban poor, by nancing extremely low-

budget, community-managed projects which

involve neither contractors nor developers. Source: ACHR

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Housing finance partnership in Philippines

THE SITUATION: A small squatter community of 60 households was settled on commer-cially valuable land behind the Cebu Hospital, which the landowner wanted to clear anddevelop. Pagtambayayong helped the community to successfully negotiate for alternativeland everyone approved, 2 kilometres away, in the tree-lined suburb of Sareehay.

THE DEAL: In exchange for people vacating the place where they’d lived for many years,the landowner agreed to “buy back” the land from the households at a much-negotiated rateof 1,000 Pesos (US$ 22) per square metre (calculated by house size), as compensationfor the cost of moving and rebuilding. In addition, the landowner agreed to buy and fullydevelop the community-approved alternative land, which would then be turned over to thecommunity’sSareehay Sanciangko Riverside Homeowners Association, and “parcelized”

into individual titles in each household’s name.

THE PROJECT: Through a contract with Eco-Builders (Pagtambayayong’s constructionoffshoot), the landowner paid for the new land to be surveyed, and for roads, drainage andwater supply to be installed at Sareehay, according to the community’s site plan, drawn upin working-sessions, with help from Pagtambayayong. Plans include a community centre,a big playing eld in the middle and plot sizes of 36 and 54 square metres, depending on

whether households were tenants or “owners” at the old settlement.

THE HOUSES: People used their “buy-back” cash to build new houses. Some took CMP

loans to supplement their budgets. The houses range from cheap bamboo huts on stilts, tosolid 2-story block residences. Most households built their own houses, re-using materialsfrom their old houses, but some contracted Eco-Builders to build cost-effective row-houseswith compressed earth blocks and micro-cement roof tiles, and designed with high roofswith room for adding a second oor later.

Source: ACHR

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Everybody wins:

Sareehay helped to set an importantprecedent in Cebu, where landowners

who prot from clearing land of poor

households accept some responsibility for

providing alternative land and assistingthe community’s resettlement process.

The land owner can then reap real estate prots, and the poor households get

decent, secure land and houses.

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Partnership with communityorganizations in sanitation5

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Authorities are beginning to acknowledge that ifhalf the city lives in degraded, unhealthy environ-ments, without access to basic services, it’s badnews for the city as a whole. But most ofcials who

make decisions about sanitation in slums havenever seen a viable, community-managed toiletthemselves. This lack of knowledge make thingsslow to change. There are very few examples ofhow to make toilets that are affordable, replicable

and work.Since 1995, the alliance ofNational Slum-dwellersFederation, Mahila Milan andSPARC has helpedslum communities in over 50 Indian cities to designand build community-managed toilets. They startedsmall with toilet blocks of 5 or 10 seats in Mumbai,Kanpur and Bangalore. These early toilets were allidea-testers, built to provide examples for everyone

to see and learn from. They showed new waysfor poor communities and governments to worktogether to provide toilets that are better, cheaperand made using the greatest source of energy inIndia:poor communities.

Most of India’s infrastructure budget is beingpoured into cities, but little of this goes into sanita-tion in slums. As a result, half of all urban Indiansdo not have access to a functioning toilet. Butsome breakthroughs in Mumbai and Pune make agood example of what can happen when authori-ties do decide that universal sanitation is a priorityand join hands with a poor community federationto ensure that every single poor household in the

city has a clean toilet to use.Millions of poor people in Indian cities are

defecating along roadsides, railway tracks

and footpaths, where they are shouted at,

molested, dumped on and insulted. Nobody

would endure these things if they had any

other choice. Either no toilets are available or

they are in such bad conditions or locations

that defecating in public is preferable. Indianslums are littered with broken-down, badly-

planned, badly-maintained and badly-lit public

toilets. For women and children, this can be

particularly difcult.

Shared costs, shared

responsibility

The National Slum-dwellersFederation’s simple cost-sharingtoilet paradigm is this: communitiesplan, construct and maintain sharedtoilets in their own settlements,at the ratio of one toilet per fourhouseholds. The state brings

sewers, water supply and electricityto the site and pays for thematerials.

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Sanitation partnership in Mumbai, India

The big surprise of the NSDF’s communitytoilets is that shared toilets in a slum don’thave to be dirty. Many of the toilets are so

clean that they have become pit stops formill workers, head-loaders, rickshaw pullershappy to pay a rupee to use a clean toilet.

People congregate outside, where pan andchai wallahs set up business.

The NSDF / MM / SPARC alliance dramatically scaled-up their toilet building programme when itwas contracted to build 113 toilet blocks (2,000 seats) in Pune, through an initiative of the Munici-pal Commissioner, and then another 320 toilet blocks (6,400 seats) in Mumbai, under the WorldBank-nanced Mumbai Sanitation Project. The two projects, which provide sanitation to 1 million

people, are nished now and work on more toilets in many other cities is in full swing. The challenge

was to use the construction of these 433 toilet blocks to set new norms and standards for design,construction, management and maintenance of municipal-nanced toilets in poor communities.

What are some of the innovations that went into these toilets?

Delivery of basic services: The toilet-contracting strategy created jobs, built communityskills and transformed relationships between municipalities and poor communities, by makingservice delivery a joint venture rather than a contracted activity.Design norms: The old municipal toilet blocks had no separation between men’s and women’stoilets and no water supply. The new toilets are designed with a complex of facilities inside anenclosure, including separate men’s and women’s stalls, special children’s latrines, separateurinals, private bathing places, water supply and storage facilities, space for people waiting inlong queues, a care-taker’s room, and in many cases, space for tea and pan shops.

Contracting: In many communities, women undertook the entire toilet contracts, hiring work-

ers from the community, managing money, supervising the construction work and coordinatingwith the engineers and municipal inspectors.Partnership: The project changed the nature of the partnership between municipalities andcommunities and changed the way the city dialogues with communities and NGOs to undertakeservice-delivery contracts.Finance: In both cities, the city pays for construction of the toilets and the communities payfor maintenance, water-supply and electricity.Maintenance: The toilets are all maintained by communities — either by city-wide MahilaMilan collectives or by local communities themselves, charging a small monthly fee of 10

rupees ($0.25) per household. All the toilets have care-taker’s rooms inside.Source: ACHR

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Partnership with communityorganizations in infrastructure 6

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ß Community as designer ß Community as engineer ß Community as contractor

Sri Lanka’s pioneering community contractsystem is a good example of how a governmentcan facilitate the delivery of basic services andinfrastructure to the city’s poor communities with

relatively little budget or effort, by contracting thetask entirely to communities, and letting them bethe designers, builders and managers of thoseimprovements.

About half of Colombo’s population live in it’s 1,506poor settlements. These settlements vary in sizefrom 60 to 1,200 households - many of them badlyunder-serviced. Since the 1980s, many of thesecommunities have been supported to plan andcarry out their own infrastructure improvements,under the community contract system.

The idea of community contracts rst came up

under the national government’s innovative, com-munity-based Million Houses Programme, which

was launched in 1985 in 51 Sri Lankan townsand cities, with technical support provided by theNational Housing Development Authority (NHDA).Under the programme, each community formedcommunity development councils, which wouldthen survey and map the existing settlement,and work with NHDA staff to draw up new layoutplans of houses, lanes, community spaces andinfrastructure networks for each community.

Under theMillion Houses Programme, communi-ties could apply for small government grants tosupport infrastructure projects they planned andbuilt themselves, by acommunity contract betweenthe community and the authorities.

Instead of hiring contractors and engineers, com-munities did the work of building water supplysystems, toilets, drains, footpaths and access

roads themselves, and the government supportedthem with technical and nancial assistance. The

community contract system gave the communityfull control over the process of infrastructure de-livery, and was a simple, exible, transparent and

community-built strategy for accomplishing this.

Between 1984 and 1989 more than 38,000 house-holds in Colombo alone improved their housing

and living environments dramatically under theprogramme, which in turn brought about positiveimpacts on their health and economic well- being.The Million Houses Programme ended abruptly in1993, but the community contract system is stillalive in Sri Lanka, in a smaller-scale, still empow-ering communities to design, implement, manageand maintain their own settlement infrastructure,with support from the government, local authorities,

NGOs and other agencies.Source: Sevanatha P H

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Infrastructure partnership in Sri Lanka

Individual water taps: The rst community contract involved laying a water supplysystem that linked all 109 houses with household metered water connections, funded bya $6,000 grant from RDA, to which the community contributed US$36 per household. The

whole system was laid by the local residents, using their contributed labour.Waste water drains: The second contract involved laying a full system of open wastewater drains throughout the community, linking with each house’s bathroom and kitchen,funded by a US$9,500 grant from USIP, with community contributions of US$5 per house-hold. They managed the construction themselves, hiring laborers from the community.

Sewer network: The next contract involved laying an underground sewer system for toiletwaste from all 109 houses. The National Housing Development Authority provided the grantof $13,500, to which the community contributed $5 per household. The households designed,

built and maintained the whole system, using labour hired from within the community, withtechnical help from Sevanatha. Each household was responsible for its own toilet.

The upgrading of the Poorwarama Community, in Colombo, makes a good example of the kindof government-community partnership the community contract system promotes, to bring basicservices into poor communities. The 109 households at Poorwarama were relocated here in 1999from their 50-year old settlement after a long, bitter eviction struggle, to make way for a hospitalproject. The poor households were nally able to negotiate a resettlement package in which they

got free 50-square metre plots on nearby land they had identied themselves, and a little cash

compensation to build temporary houses — but with no basic services. With help from the NGOSevanatha, they identied and prioritized their needs and developed a settlement improvement

plan. Poorwarama’s community development council then divided the improvements into a seriesof separate projects, to submit as community contract proposals to the Urban Settlement Improve-ment Project (USIP) or the Road Development Authority (RDA) for funding.

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It’s cheaper when poorcommunities do the workthemselves:

It cost the government just

US$ 29,000 to provide watersupply, drainage and sewerage to109 households in Poorwarama.

That’s just $266 per household— a fraction of what it would havecost the government or a privatecontractor to do the same work.

Source: Sevanatha

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Partnership with community orga-nizations in disaster rehabilitation7

possible. TheSave the Andaman CommunitiesNetwork was hastily established and workingteams were sent to each affected province to

survey the damage and to begin providing relief

assistance to people in tsunami-hit villages,

in the form of tents, clothes, medicines, food,

water, cofns, and rallying help searching for

the dead. Within a week, the work of setting up

temporary housing in relief camps began.

Besides causing so much death and destruction,

the tsunami tore open and exposed many deep,

pre-existing problems of poverty, social exclu-

sion and land tenure uncertainty. The tsunami

also created a whole set of new problems when

people’s livelihoods, social structures, survival

systems and ways of life were swept away, along

with their houses and boats. But with all the

misfortune came an unexpected opportunity forthese already vulnerable coastal communities

to use the relief process to also begin tackling

these deeper, more structural problems which

jeopardized their future.

Source: www.achr.net

Most of the relief work that governments do afterdisasters is provided through a welfare approachand sees people as helpless victims. Of coursehelp is greatly needed after a major calamity, butthe experience of the 2004 tsunami in Thailandshows that when the affected communities canbe supported to take charge of their own reliefand rehabilitation, in partnership with governmentand relief agencies, nobody gets left out and the

process strengthens the community.

The day after the tsunami hit southern Thailand, theCommunity Organizations Development Institute(CODI) met with NGOs, civic groups, communitynetworks and government organizations operatingin the southern part of the country to see how theycould work jointly to assist the tsunami victims inthe six battered provinces.

It was clear that providing quick, effective reliefafter a catastrophe of this scale was far beyond themeans of any government or single organization tohandle. The job called for thecombined support,skills and resources of as many groups, individu-

als, relief agencies and community networks as

CODI and its partners set out to useevery aspect of the relief process toorganize and strengthen the coastal

communities affected by the tsunamiand place them at the centre of therehabilitation process, speaking on

their own behalf and deciding what theywanted to do, rather than remaining

powerless victims.

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Disaster partnership in Tsunami-hit Thailand

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Disaster as a developmentopportunity:

The idea was to nd practical ways

for the tsunami survivors to takepart in running their camp and tobe actively involved in managingas many aspects of their lives as

possible, even in this extreme situ-ation, so they could get back intothe active mode of taking care of

things themselves.

People-managed relief at the Bang Muang Camp

tents in a system of 10-household groups and3-group zones, each with its own leader. Com-mittees were set up to manage cooking, camphygiene, water supply, medical care, visitors,children’s activities, lost people, registration ofnewcomers, donations and temporary houseconstruction. Camp-wide meetings were heldevery night to discuss practical aspects ofcamp management, make announcements

and give the committees a chance to reporton the day’s work. Everyone knew what washappening and all decisions were made in pub-lic, with everyone’s agreement. A boat-repairworkshop was started, savings groups and acommunity bank were set up, and livelihoodprojects were launched to tide people over, inthe face of lost livelihoods and slow-movinggovernment compensation.

There was a lot of grief there, of course, butthe shock for many visitors to Bang Muang wasthe lively atmosphere of the place, more likea village fair than a refugee camp. Life clearlyhadn’t stopped.

www.achr.net

Soon after the tsunami, it was clear that themost urgent need was to provide temporary

housing to bring back together people scat-

tered by the tsunami, so they could organize

themselves, discuss, set priorities and begin

developing a collective vision of their future.

Camps were soon being set up by aid orga-nizations and government agencies all along

the Andaman coast. In Phangnga, the worst-affected province, CODI’s network helped

set up ve camps — the largest and rst to

open at Bang Muang. Though planned for

only 400, the camp eventually gave shelter

to 3,500 people, most from nearby Ban NamKhem, Thailand’s worst-hit village, where

over 2,000 people died and 1,300 houses

were destroyed.

What made the Bang Muang camp unusualwas that it was managed by the tsunami victimsthemselves. Community network leaders, CODIand NGO organizers worked with the survivorsto organize the camp together. After putting uptoilets, bathing areas, cooking tents and spacesfor relief activities, they laid out neat rows of

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6 tools which communities use tobuild their organizations

Most good tools educate andmobilize at the same time. They

have a double edge: they have

both practical and strategic valueto communities in their strugglefor land tenure, secure houses,basic services and jobs.

Community leaders need tools in order to mo-bilize their own and other poor communities,

to form the “critical mass” which is prerequisite

to bringing about real change at a wider scale.

These kinds of tools are emerging gradually,

from experiments and practical applicationswithin Asia’s community movements, and are

now being actively used.

When something that poor communities do in

one place is found to be useful, it gets repeated.

With repetition, it becomes a feature of their work

and begins being used with greater intention.

The more it is used, the more it gets rened and

standardized. And before you know it, you’ve gota proper tool. A people’s tool. Through transfer

and adaptation, these tools get reinvented in

other places, creating new tools. As with all

tools, people master them only by using them:

tools that help them to negotiate with the state,

tools that help them explore house design

possibilities, tools that help them to organize a

savings group or to analyze conditions in their

settlements.

Source: Face to Face. www.achr.net

When we look at the many communityorganizations that exist in Asian countries,there are two questions to ask:

Are there negotiations going on be-

tween these community organizationsand their governments?

If so, what skills help these communi-ties to leverage the negotiations, andwhat tools help build those skills?

Before communities can present themselves asviable development partners in tackling problemsthey face in their cities, they rst need to prepare

themselves. One important part of this preparationis building strong, democratic decision-makingmechanisms within communities which reflectthe interests of all their members — the better-offand the poorer, the house-owners and the renters.

Another part is developing skills to manage moneycollectively, linking into networks, gathering infor-mation about their settlements, nding alternative

land and developing realistic alternative housingplans which address issues of people’s survivaland the city’s development.

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For community organizations across Asia, animportant part of their data-gathering process ismaking settlement maps, which include houses,shops, workshops, pathways, water points, elec-tric poles, and problem spots, so people can get

a visual idea of their physical situation. Mappingis a vital skill-builder when it comes time to plansettlement improvements and to assess develop-ment interventions. In Thailand, for example,canal-side communities drew scaled maps of

their own settlements, as part of their redevelop-ment planning, and travelled upstream to nd and

map sources of pollution from factories, hospitals,restaurants and sewers. They learn these skillsfrom other canal settlers. These community maps,with their detailed, accurate, rst-hand information

on sources of pollution, were a powerful planningand mobilizing tool, and also made an effectivebargaining chip in negotiations for secure tenure,with authorities who often accuse communities ofpolluting the canals they live along.

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Enumeration in IndiaTwenty years ago, there was no policy for pave-ment dwellers in the city of Mumbai — nobodyeven acknowledged their existence. Every day,pavement slums were being demolished, butthe only thing that was clear was that it was thecity’s job to demolish and poor people’s job tobuild again. The rst survey of pavement dwell-ers in 1986, documented in “We the Invisible”dened a universe which nobody knew existed,and it started Mahila Milan, the communityorganization which would eventually transformtheir statistics and their understanding into aresettlement policy for pavement dwellers allover the city. In the meantime, they traveledto cities all over India, Asia and Africa, helpingothers conduct enumerations. Their motto is

that “When in doubt, count!”

Settlement enumeration by the poor people them-selves can be a powerful tool. When poor peopledo the counting, it can also be a great community

mobilizer. When communities and their networkssurvey all the poor and informal settlements in acity, they are often gathering data that has neverbeen gathered before on numbers, livelihoods,problems and living conditions of large segmentsof the urban population.

Enumeration helps poor communities realize thatthey are not alone, and that the housing problemsthey face are linked to much larger structural issuesof how cities are planned and urban land is used.Because the information people gather often ismore accurate and comprehensive than anythingthe authorities possess, it leads to better, moreappropriate local planning and can be a powerfultool for the poor when it comes to negotiating forland and access to entitlements. Good surveyinformation puts communities in a more proactiveand less defensive position when they go into thesenegotiations. With detailed data, it also becomes T O

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TOOL 1: Settlement enumeration

TOOL 2: Community mapping

easier for local governments to justify, and knowwhere, to intervene. Surveys also give each personin an informal settlement an ofcial identity, often

for the rst time.

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TOOL 3: Community savings and credit

It is a simple and direct way for poor people to take care of their immediateneeds. Community managed savings and credit brings people in a community to worktogether on a regular basis, and to make joint decisions about activities which affect

their lives, through a mechanism that is grounded in simple, regular rituals which relate

directly to their day-to-day needs. Collective saving provides the poor with a resource

base which they control, and also creates an on-going process of learning about eachother’s lives, about managing together and about relating to outside systems with

greater nancial strength.

It is an active way of building community organizations. Saving is a tool todevelop a more comprehensive self-development process in urban poor settlements, in

which the poor themselves (and large networks of poor communities) gradually develop

the condence, the managerial capacity and the scale they need to link with the formal

system and to become stronger players in the larger urban development process.

It creates a structure for cooperation, mutual assistance and collectiveaction. By linking people together on a regular basis, savings helps poor people worktogether to tackle larger problems of poverty such as tenure security, housing, basic

services, livelihood and welfare. By building a framework for managing these more

complex development tasks, savings groups can help support a community’s holistic

development.

It builds power and money. It may be possible for individual savings groups to takecare of many of their community’s internal needs. And it may also be possible for com-

munity organizations without savings to link together and to organize people’s power toa limited extent. But with savings and credit at the core of the process, you have both

money and power: those two essential elements in improving poor people’s lives.

It builds people’s skills to take on larger development projects. Savings buildsthe kind of collective managerial capacities communities need to enter into joint ventures

with their municipal governments. The collective asset which savings represents can

be a powerful bargaining chip when communities go negotiating for external resources

for housing and development projects, and when linking with the formal system. (See

Quick Guide 5 on Housing Finance)Source: UCDO Update, No. 2, October 2000. Download from www.codi.or.th

For community networks, federations and organizations around Asia, community savings has becomeone of the most fundamental elements in their growth and success in bringing about change in poor

people’s lives. It’s no exaggeration to say that collective savings and credit has revolutionized Asia’scommunity organizations. Why is collective savings so important for the poor?

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PHOTO29 - A

When many small savings groups link together,their larger networks of savings groups canopen access to greater nancial resources

and enhanced clout when it comes to nego-

tiating for what they need. Savings groups

enable poor community organizations to work

as equal partners with government agenciesand NGOs, because when people have

resources of their own, which they control,

they are no longer in the position of beggars,

but can decide for themselves what kind of

development they want.

This process has political implications, becausethe stronger status of these savings networks

enables the poor to deal with the larger, struc-tural issues which underlie their problems. As these networks grow, they become viabledevelopment partners for local and nationalgovernments, to work together on solutionsto problems of housing, tenure, infrastructure,environment and welfare. Community savingsgroups can also help bridge the gap betweeninformal and formal nance systems. Loans for

housing, land and infrastructure developmentprojects in poor communities are now being

No longer beggars

Communities which come to the table with their own savingsare in a position to work with their cities as equal partners

channeled collectively, through establishedsavings groups, in many countries.

“A country without a nance ministry

is like a body without any blood. In the

same way, a poor community needs itsown nance section to handle money

and to link people together to makedecisions about improving their lives. In

communities, that nance section is the

savings group.”

Daily savingThe practice of saving daily was pioneered inpoor communities in India and South Africa,

but the idea has since spread all over Asia.Why does saving daily work for so many poorcommunity organizations?

Daily saving allows a savings group to sinknew roots into a community — roots thatbring people together on a daily basis andgo much deeper than monthly saving, wherepeople “transact one day and sleep the other29.” Daily saving also attracts a community’s

poorest members, who earn their living on adaily basis, and who have a hard time beingpart of a monthly saving process. Plus, whenpeople save and repay their loans daily, itmeans payments are smaller, more regularand less intimidating than a big monthlypayment, so it helps make loan repaymentsmore manageable and can help resolverepayment problems.

Source: UCDO Update, No. 2, October 2000. Down-load from www.codi.or.th)

Somsook Boonyabancha, CODI, Thailand

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Scattered, small-scale savings and credit groups,as they develop and mature, almost inevitably linkwith other groups and form larger-scale networkswith some kind ofconnected nancial or organiza-tional base. Networks provide horizontal support

to individual communities, and opportunities

for exchange of experience and learning from

each other. They also create possibilities for

pooling resources. This kind of collaboration

provides groups with access to greater nancial

resources, a greater sense of solidarity and

enhanced clout when it comes to negotiatingwith the state and with other actors on the urban

scene for entitlements and resources.

This process has political implications, since thestronger status of networks makes it possible forthe poor to deal with larger, structural issues relatedto their problems — issues that were beyond their

Poor people want resources (land,

quick guides for policy makers 6 community-based organizations the poor as agents of development.pdf

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