Welcome to the ACCA homepage. Here we will upload the latest news from the program. To the right is a brief introduction attempting to put the ACCA program into a development context.

The ACCA process is quite new and in our view very innovative (hopefully "revolutionary" ) in its attempt to make people the centre of each city's urban poor development process. Therefore we will be giving as much information as possible for ACCA members and interested development actors to understand its process and progress.

For the present time will put documentation of ACCA progress on this page by way of DOWNLOADS of all meetings and reports. Each is a rather copious and comprehensive account of a step by step process of initiating the most people centred development process ever attempted in Asia And each report is followed by an "exposure" to the city process in which the meetings were held.

If you are new to this site, the the most recent reports appear first below, the earlier reports are below, starting from the first report at the bottom of the page.

Reports by Tom Kerr, Somsook Boonyabancha and host cities.

One Page of Statistics on ACCA's First Year HERE

 

 

Putting the ACC program in context

The development agencies and governments are seeking to help poor people most adversely affected by their city developments.  And the groups in ACCA are the ones who are finding the way, making plans and getting support to poor people.  In some ways we help quite a lot.  But compared to the scale of these ever-increasing problems, these efforts of ours may not be sufficient for the larger changing context, rapid urbanization, etc.  

Also, we can see that there is a lot of growth and development of the quality in poor communities and their organizations.  
Most of the countries in Asia now have some kind of community organization movement, which has helped poor communities to move from isolation and problematic situations into some kind of organized systems of mutual support.  Community savings activities have been adopted and scaled up in most Asian countries now.  And communities in so many countries are now linked into networks - within cities, within countries and within the whole Asia region now.  We see so many projects now where communities and networks are able to start working together and start proposing the development initiatives they design to the government organizations.  

So it's clear that communities in Asia are growing, and this enthusiastic growth shows us the new strength, the new power of change.   

• This new emerging strength of poor people in urban and rural areas is increasing.  Poor communities and their organizations are finding more space to take control of their lives, to be more equally involved in decisions about their own development, are becoming the key actors in  making their change and solving their problems themselves, in the right direction.   This is all increasing.  

• Our societies are moving in this direction!  Every country in Asia will have to be more open and more democratic, more or less.  The space for people has to be more open - if it is not open, people will crash it and break it open!       

So how can we find that this emerging force of people becomes a new energy of big change, by people?  How to get the poor in Asian cities to "erupt" as the main actors in their own development?  How can we find a way that the energy of people can link together, work with other actors and look at the development by themselves, in a larger scale, in a more managed manner, together with the knowledge and experience of the good development agencies?  We link together into a new change of the whole society, the whole city - in which poor people on the ground (civic groups?) can more equally participate and solve many of the city problems.  

• This is where the ACCA Program comes in.  This ACCA Program is a new tool for building the Asian coalition - the real coalition - not just meetings, but doing and sharing and supporting each other in the region, to make room for poor people in our societies.

• Cities today have more problems than solutions!  The best way to change this is to make people the most active key actors and the key participants in the development.  Without this force of people being engaged in a big, city-wide way, the efforts to bring about change from the old "supply side" (i.e. initiated and done by development agencies and governments alone) will not be able to cope with the scale of problems.

 

 

This report presents a summary of the activities undertaken by Asian Coalition for Housing Rights during the first six month’s implementation of its new Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) Program. This new program, which is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was approved initially at the end of October 2008. The work began two months later, in December 2008, after ACHR signed a contract with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which has agreed to act as an intermediary for the project funding from the Gates Foundation.

Apart of the learning process and new structures being set up to make communities the centre of decision making processes the ACCA program has initiated many projects and process in numerous cities as summarised below:

• Small and Large projects
By the end of the first six months, a total of 159 small upgrading projects (in 159 slum communities in 29 cities in 12 countries, with a total budget of US$ 377,800) and 23 big housing projects (in 23 cities in 10 countries, with a total budget of US$ 870,000) were approved and are now underway.

• Surveys
City-wide information gathering has begun in 37 cities and nation-wide surveys have begun in three countries.

• Savings and funds
All 37 cities in the ACCA Program so far have already got quite extensive community savings and credit activities going on, and the program is giving a big boost to the process of strengthening and expanding these savings groups.

• Community funds
In 23 of these cities, the savings groups are in the process of linking together through new city-wide community development funds, through which the funds for their big projects will be channeled. Some cities are also opting to channel their small project budgets (as both grants and loans) through their city-wide funds. The funding support from ACCA has thus made it possible to establish and seed new city development funds in 25 - 30 cities.

Download PDF File Text and Photos 656 KBS

 

This report: "ACCA Regional Meeting Rayong April 2009" provides a detailed summary of the city-projects that were presented, the discussions that took place and the decisions that were made in the Rayong meeting, and the version we attach here incorporates all the revisions and corrections made by the committee members after the meeting.

 

 

Download PDF FIle Text and Photos 1.9 MB

 

 

"Thinking City-wide in Chantaburi" describes the city-wide slum upgrading work going on in the eastern Thai city of Chantaburi, where the Rayong meeting participants spent a day visiting projects and talking with community network leaders and municipal officials about their collaborative progress in ensuring that all of Chataburi's poor live in beautiful, secure and healthy communities which they have built themselves.

Download PDF File Text and Photos 1.74 MB

 

This report presents some notes on the
discussions that took place and
presentations that were made during the
Regional Community Workshop on People's
Process, a gathering of about 90 urban poor
community leaders and their supporters
from twelve Asian countries. The gathering
was organized by ACHR and hosted in the
Philippines by the Homeless People's
Federation Philippines (HPFP), at the Sulo
Hotel, in Quezon City, between March 30 -
April 4, 2009.

"The key actors to bring about real change to poverty in our countries are people on the ground. So we are trying to find ways to make people on the ground as strong as possible to make change on the ground - with their city governments and with their professional allies in the city. If poor people come with empty hands, as individuals, asking only for help (with their problems of electricity, with water supply, eviction), then nobody will help them. Cities have lots of other priorities than helping the needy poor! But when poor people are organized, when they have their own money, when they have their networks and their savings and their plans and their strength, their cities and their allies will listen to them and they
can propose anything and then get it! "

Download PDF File Text and Photos 1.3 MB

In Iloilo, the network of urban poor communities and local government agencies are tackling the city's serious problems of land, housing, infrastructure, livelihood and disaster rehabilitation in ways that are unusually collaborative, unusually comprehensive in their scope and advance planning, and unusually rich in the central involvement of the communities who experience these problems directly. In the past few years, thinking and working in ways that are truly city-wide have become standard operating procedure in Iloilo, and there are already some remarkable achievements to show for this new way of working. For that reason, the city makes a terrific case-study for the kind of city-wide processes the ACCA Program is trying to promote. The following report gives a brief picture of the work going on in Iloilo, and has been drawn from the "Dagyaw" Newsletter prepared by the Iloilo City Urban Poor Network and from notes taken by Tom Kerr, who joined the trip to Iloilo.

Download PDF File Text and Photos 1.31 MB

 

The first report, "ACCA Committee Meeting Nepal Feb 2009", summarizes the key points from this first ACCA Program committee meeting.  The report includes important points that were raised, agreements that were reached and information about approvals of the first batch of city projects proposed to the ACCA Program so far.

 

Download Here     PDF 1 MB Notes and Photos    17 pages

 

Details about the Nepal situation and from the trip to visit the city of Bharatpur, which was selected to be one of the two pilot cities proposed to ACCA Program from Nepal.  It has been one of our key ideas to organize each ACHR/ACCA committee meeting in a different city, and with this report, you will understand how we make use of committee meeting as an opportunity to focus on, learn about and participate in the city and country process in greater detail.  The report includes stories about visits to several poor settlements in Bharatpur and discussions with communities and officials there

Download Here             PDF 1 MB Notes and photos   15 pages

 

 

More details of the program will be posted soon.