The Philippines Homeless People's
Federation brings together poor community organizations in cities across
the Philippines, all engaged with finding solutions to problems they
face with secure land, housing, income, infrastructure, health, welfare
and access to affordable credit. Some groups are new, others are being
revived, some are church-related, others are mini-federations in their
own right. The common thread in all these groups is managing their own
savings and credit programs and using savings as the central means of
improving their livelihoods, strengthening their communities and
securing land and houses.
Communities in several cities had been
running savings programs for several years and had made some contacts
with each other. But the idea of joining these scattered initiatives
into something larger came in the past two years, when visits to poor
people's federations in India, South Africa and Thailand showed the
enormous potential of large-scale community federations. With support
from the federation's NGO partner, the Vincentian Missionaries
Development Foundation, and using the tool of community exchange visits,
strong ties have been forged between groups in 18 cities, all with
diverse operating structures, working styles and local ideas.
The federation's first national
assembly was held in September 1998, and was hosted by the Lupang
Pangako Urban Poor Association, in the sprawling slums which encircle
the mountainous garbage dump at Payatas. The meeting drew together some
1,000 local members and over 200 community leaders from around the
Philippines - Mandaue, Cebu, Calbayog, Samar, Iloilo, Davao, Surigao,
General Santos City, Bicol and Metro Manila. The assembly makes a good
example of the lively style of the federation's process: at least eight
languages were spoken at the assembly, and dozens of sharply different
local realities were enumerated. The assembly provided a venue for
defining support mechanisms to strengthen these organizations and for
discussing issues like access to government loan programs, land title
and land conversion problems, land acquisition strategies, evictions,
negotiating with local governments and landowners, dealing as equals
with NGO partners.
The lack of affordable land and
housing options for the poor in most Philippines cities means that
between a third and a half of the urban population are forced to live in
informal settlements, in conditions that are illegal, insecure and
environmentally degraded, without access to toilets, water supply,
electricity and in ever-present danger of eviction. Without secure land,
houses and communities, more and more of the poor's scanty resources go
into just surviving, catching people up in a hopeless cycle of squatting
and eviction which only further further impoverishes the poor, and
prevents them from developing themselves.
