Nepal’s first community-planned and community-built housing relocation project

These days, most of the news coming out of Nepal is very dire:  civil war, coups d’etat, election boycotts, strikes, black-outs, bomb blasts.  But in the midst of these large-scale upheavals, a great milestone for the country’s landless squatter communities has been quietly taking place. 

On December 24, 2005, Nepal’s first community-planned and community-built housing relocation project (for squatters evicted to make way for a road-building project) was inaugurated at Kirtipur, a small but ancient municipality in the Kathmandu Valley.

The project is small – only 44 houses – but it represents an important breakthrough for all the partners that helped make it happen:  Nepal’s national federation of squatter communities, its sister federation of women’s savings and credit collectives, the Lumanti support NGO, the Municipality of Kathmandu, the new Kathmandu Urban Poor Support Fund, ACHR, SDI, WaterAid and several others. 

 

ACHR supported groups of community leaders and their NGO and government supporters from India and Thailand to join the Kirtipur project inauguration, share ideas about community upgrading and people-driven housing and to attend the women’s savings federation’s annual gathering, along with women and men community members from 22 districts around Nepal. 

 

For more information, please contact Lajana at Lumanti.  (email:  shelter@lumanti.wlink.com.np or visit their website:  www.lumanti.com.np

HERE at the Lumanti web site
you can read more about the Kirtipur project

History of the Project
The advancements made in 2004
Problems remaining to be solved
Financial matters
Self-reflection concerning the project
The Inauguration of the Kirtipur Housing Project
Annex