The seventh Millennium Development Goal calls for significant improvements in slum dwellers’ lives. However, conventional upgrading projects are unlikely to be enough. Thailand has developed successful partnerships between government agencies and community-based organisations encouraging slum dwellers to use their savings to improve their housing. Is this the way forward?

A paper from the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) describes the Baan Mankong national slum and squatter upgrading programme launched by the Thai government in 2003.

In Thailand, 8.25 million people live in poor-quality housing, 30 percent of who are squatters. The rest rent land but do not have secure contracts. Many communities are under threat of eviction and only one in five people can afford conventional housing on the open market or through government housing programmes.

Baan Mankong aims to solve such problems by allowing slum communities to participate in a local development process to improve their settlements and houses and get more secure tenure through long-term leases or co-operative land ownership. The programme’s management board brings together different interest groups, senior government staff, academics and community representatives.

Initially, loans were available to community-based savings groups for income generation, land acquisition and housing improvement. Any community would receive loans if it could show that it had management capacity. Now loans are provided to communities and community networks that are free to lend on to their members.

As networks manage loans, decision-making is now decentralised, bringing it closer to individual communities and allowing them to respond rapidly to opportunities identified by network members. As savings schemes have become stronger, Baan Mankong has developed links between community groups and city authorities.

Important features of the initiatives underway in 175 communities are:

• prioritising the upgrading of existing settlements to avoid disruption to people’s lives and social networks
• helping poor communities acquire financial management skills
• increasing awareness that slum dwellers learn by seeing differences with their own eyes and then comparing the conditions that make those differences
• allowing communities to break out of isolation and discover they have allies: people with similar difficulties, fates and ways of doing things.
• The Baan Mankong experience shows that it is possible to break down hierarchical systems and disrupt the patron–client relationships that keep slum dwellers dependent on non-slum dwellers. The researchers urge urban planners and city authorities to:
• realise that slums are normal and part of existing city structures
• abandon old ideas about ‘legal versus illegal’ or ‘them versus us’
• ensure that pilot upgrading projects are chosen by urban poor groups, their organisations and networks
• make sure that pilot projects are not too similar – diversity is essential for learning
• consider upgrading as an opportunity to promote genuine decentralisation – communities can also manage parks, markets, solid waste collection, recycling and community welfare.

Source(s):
‘Baan Mankong: going to scale with “slum” and squatter upgrading in Thailand’, International Institute for Environment and Development, Environment & Urbanization Vol. 17 No. 1, by Somsook Boonyabancha, April 2005 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 2 December 2005

Further Information:
Somsook Boonyabancha
Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI)
2044/31-32 Petchburitatmai Road
Huaykhwang, Bangkok 10320
Thailand

Tel: +662 716 6000
Fax: +662 716 6001
Contact the contributor: achr@loxinfo.co.th

Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), Thailand

Asian Coalition for Housing Rights

Other related links:
'Supporting the urban poor to become development actors: a Thai experience'

'Community initiatives: slum dwellers can do it for themselves'

'Can squatters be developers?'

'Relocation or upgrading? Improving the welfare of slum dwellers'

'Pro-poor housing loans in the Philippines'