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The
Growth of Lumanti ...
Ramesh
Manandar was a Nepali housing activist who was well known in the Asia
region. After he died
tragically in a plane crash in 1992, friends across the ACHR network
took up a collection to establish the “Ramesh Fund.”
Lajana,
Ramesh’s wife, began linking together people in Katmandu who’d been
involved in housing and poverty issues and used the fund as seed money to
start the Lumanti Support Group for Shelter in 1993.
Lumanti's focus is on issues of housing, development and
access to credit in urban poor communities.
In
recent years, Lumanti has begun working closely with an established
federation of poor communities and helped start a new women’s savings
federation, which together now cover more than half the city’s slum
and squatter settlements.
As
these federations have grown in size, confidence and ability,
Lumanti’s work in savings, housing, infrastructure, education and
income generation has multiplied alongside them.
As
of 2001, Lumanti is working in 70 slums. By creating a strategic
alliance with these maturing federations, it can help communities take over responsibility for their own development and expansion
to work with other communities.
“If by working alone you managed to get into 70
communities, what if you now used those 70 communities to go into 700
communities? A year ago,
the city wasn’t even ready to look at this work.
Today you are all sitting together having tea! At least that’s a start.
But if your aim is to bring larger pressure on the government to
recognize a hundred times what it recognizes today, that will be
possible only by creating a critical mass in poor communities.”
Jockin Amputham slum leader from NSDF India
Lajana Manadhar
Prafulla Pradhan
Advisor to Lumanti
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Two
federations are networking together more and more in Nepal, and have worked
together to host several milestone events, including Nepal’s first
Model House Exhibition in November 1999 picture below
The squatters federation
continues to focus on land tenure
issues, and the women’s federation n savings and credit and
infrastructure issues.
The
Nepal Baso Bas Basti Samrochan Samaj
Federation of Squatter Communities
This federation has been growing over the past ten years.
In a country where the crisis of landlessness is increasing
sharply, the federation’s main goal is to find means of securing land
tenure for poor communities in Nepal.
The national federation is now active in 16 districts across
Nepal, including two districts in the Kathmandu Valley and has over
15,000 members. The federation process, says Chairman Deepak Rai, helps bring
people who are vulnerable into something that is big and strong.
The federation began working with Lumanti several years back, and
the relationship hasn’t always been smooth.
“We fight a lot, but never mind!
We keep working together, and we credit Lumanti with bringing us
together with the NSDF in India and the Community Network in Thailand,
where we’ve gotten a lot of ideas.
Now that we are connected to an international process, that gives
us the guts to say things!”
The
Nepal Mahila Ekta Samaj
Nepal Women’s Unity Federation
Bimala Lama is an active leader from the Ramhity Basti squatter
community. After returning
from an exposure visit to Cambodia and Thailand in 1999 where she
attended a regional meeting of women’s savings groups, she immediately
began working to bring together the women’s saving and credit groups
scattered around Katmandu's squatter and slum communities.
She visited most of the sixty identified squatter communities,
telling people about the things she’d seen large networks of women’s
savings groups accomplishing in Cambodia and Thailand (where conditions
are much worse, she felt, than in Nepal), and urging the women to
combine the strength of their savings groups together into a federation.
Two
months later, women from nineteen communities gathered in a large
meeting and the Nepal Mahila Ekta Samaj was born, a committee was
elected and a celebratory round of hot tea made do for a toast.
Some men from the Baso Bas Basti Samrochan Samaj were
present at this meeting and questioned the need for a separate women’s
federation. The women
explained that their specific needs were not necessarily being addressed
by the existing squatters federation, and that a women’s federation
brings a new perspective and adds strength to the Nepal Baso Bas
Basti Samrochan Samaj.
The
two are complementary.
Since
then, the Mahila Ekta Samaj has been active in starting and
supporting savings and credit groups in new communities, helping
organize infrastructure improvement projects, spreading around
experiences building toilets and sewers through local community
exchanges and monitoring the situation in communities facing eviction.
NEXT Infrastructure Water and
Toilets HERE
Photo Gallery Urban Poor Katmandu by Nick
Seaman HERE
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