Community initiatives: slum dwellers can do it for themselves

When slum dwellers and their organisations work with their government and external agencies to ‘significantly improve their lives’ (Millennium Development Goal target 11) they often succeed where governments on their own fail. Many of the solutions are cost-effective, sustainable and have reached hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers.

Research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) concentrates on slum dwellers’ work with government, since other conventional approaches have not succeeded to the same degree. This review concentrates on the work of federations formed by slum or shack dwellers or homeless groups active in 11 countries. This approach is possibly the most realistic chance of achieving MDG target 11. Slum dwellers’ work independent of government, government’s direct work, and slum dwellers’ work to pressure government to change the way they work are also important, but have not so far shown the same potential for significant change.

Supporting community-driven processes initiated and managed by slum dwellers’ organisations and larger federations encourages effective development from district to national level. The foundation of these processes is local organisations, representative of and accountable to their members, mostly formed around small informal savings and loan groups.

Most importantly, neighbourhood community-driven processes linked at the city level through federations have persuaded government institutions to address the most difficult structural issues, such as land allocation, providing infrastructure to poor people’s organisations, and changing the way they work with poor people. Governments in both Cambodia and Thailand have made national policies based on the pioneering work of urban poor people. Six themes are common to the work of these urban poor federations:

• the ‘rights plus’ approach – not only the right to housing but the right to influence how housing needs are met (and a demonstrated capacity to do so)
• local organisations that are accountable to their members and in which women have central roles that develop their own initiatives to show government what they can do
• constant interchanges between these local organisations as they learn from each other and collaborate in city-wide consultations, data gathering, and pilot projects
• planning professionals have been transformed, learning to respond to and support poor urban people’s organisations
• federations that influence local and national governments to become more concerned with poor people’s needs – and that support federations developing in other nations
• international agencies and donors understand how federations learn from each other, and succeeded where conventional approaches have not.

Local government is prominent in all the examples in this study because community-driven processes are not separate from local government processes – indeed they are central to more effective local government processes. Donors and agencies must support community-driven processes that can develop strong and effective partnerships with local government by:

• supporting innovation and pilot projects for community-driven processes
• investigating how to widen the scale of activities, without diminishing strong community-driven processes and by supporting municipal authorities
• considering how cities’ development strategies and poverty reduction strategy processes could involve slum dwellers’ federations
• spreading learning and shared experience among international agencies. Agencies need to understand the type of support that federations need.

Source(s):
‘Meeting the Millennium Development Goals for Urban Dwellers: The current and potential role of community-driven initiatives to significantly improve the lives of slum dwellers at local, city-wide and national levels’, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) Human Settlements Group, Poverty Reduction in Urban Areas Working Papers No.16, by Celine d’Cruz and David Satterthwaite, 2005 Full document.

Funded by: Swedish Agency for International Development (Sida)

id21 Research Highlight: 27 July 2005

Further Information:
David Satterthwaite
International Institute for Environment and Development
Human Settlements Group
3 Endsleigh Street
London WC1B 4HH
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7388 2115
Fax: +44 (0)20 7388 2826
Contact the contributor: david.satterthwaite@iied.org

International Institute for Environment and Development

Celine d’Cruz
Society for the Promotion of Area Resources
PO Box 9389
Mumbai 400 026
India

Tel: +91 22 4942115
Contact the contributor: celinedcruz@mac.com

Society for the Promotion of Area Resources (SPARC), India

Other related links:
'Communities can create their own water supply and sanitation'

'Upgrading slums and preventing new ones: lessons from Cambodia'

'Can squatters be developers?'

Thailand tackles urban housing problems

'The UN demands action to improve the lives of slum dwellers'