Why are savings groups so important  ?

Women's saving group
 in Phnom Penh

SUPF 
the city-wide federation 
of urban poor groups

 

In it's first two years, the UPDF has focused on strengthening and expanding savings groups in the city to manage their own development.  Strong community savings and credit groups - and a large federation of these savings groups - are the building blocks of a people-driven development process in the city, vitally connected to housing, and environmental improvement and negotiation.  When people in poor communities start saving together and making collective decisions about money, they acquire the management skills and negotiation capacities they'll need to tackle larger development issues.  When you boost savings and credit activities on a large scale in Phnom Penh, you boost the basic mechanism by which poor people will begin dealing with their problems collectively, with strength, rather than in weakness and isolation.

 

The UPDF is part of a much larger development of a poor people's movement that is happening in the city, and part of the partnerships that is developing with the city and with other development agencies.  A critical element in the UPDF process has been it's partnership with the Solidarity for the Urban Poor Federation.   SUPF is a city-wide federation of poor community savings groups, established in 1994.  Today it is the only large-scale people's organization in the city, active in half the city's 500 poor settlements.  SUPF's seven district sub-federations ("Khan units") have helped poor communities within their districts come together, pool their own resources and work out their own solutions to problems of land security, houses, toilets, basic services and access to credit for livelihood and housing, using the tools of savings and credit, enumeration, model house exhibitions and community exchange.

Five important principals inform every aspect of the Urban Poor Development Fund's approach : 

The principal of mutual benefit 
 
If a solution to problems of urban land tenure for the poor work for one party but not for the others, it will not be sustainable.  Only when solutions are found which meet the needs of all the players concerned will they be repeated and become sustainable options.  The city must be allowed to grow and develop, and at the same time, poor communities must be able to live in conditions which are safe, secure and allow them to develop themselves.  Such solutions are possible, and may take a thousand different forms.

The principal of collaboration  

The problems of urban land and housing for the poor in Phnom Penh are too large and too complex for any group to solve alone.  Communities can be very well organised, but without the cooperation of cities, without funds, without access to land, and without technical assistance, they cannot build secure communities for themselves.  Cities, on the other hand, may have good slum redevelopment policies, but without the involvement of the organisations of the poor in that redevelopment process, the solutions won't work.  Complex problems require complex solutions and complex solutions must involve lots of people and careful collaboration.

The principal of flexibility   
 : 
The situation with regard to urban poverty in Phnom Penh - and to land for the urban poor - is extremely fluid and raw just now.  There are no systems in place, no formal mechanisms, no policies, no precedents.  This presents both a great problem and a singular opportunity, for the city represents a kind of new territory, where rules can be made up as we go along. To take advantage of the opportunities in all this flux, it is important that the mechanisms and tools that we develop to help the poor get land and houses are also fluid, light, flexible, practical  and ready to grab any opportunity, test any possible idea occurred from existing reality, and respond to whatever comes up.  Practicality is the main thing.  Whatever works must be acceptable to all stakeholders.  This means avoiding creating cumbersome bureaucracies, heavy administrative and decision-making structures, and lots of rules.  If there is a mistake in one project, the mistake can be contained in that one project, and we learn and don't make the mistake in the next one.

The principal of reaching the poorest :   

Slum redevelopment processes very often fall into the trap of answering the needs of the better-off, at the cost of the poorer community members - houses are too expensive, plots are too big and encourage speculation or buy-outs, etc.  Slums, like the larger societies of which they are a part, are filled with vested interests, entrenched power bases and both haves and have-nots.  

For solutions to poverty and to secure tenure to be sustainable in the longer term, those solutions must be designed to work to include the poorest, most vulnerable members of the community.  
And if it works for the poorest, adaptations of the solution will work for the better off.

The principal of involvement in city planning

This is the principal of always working in ways which relate community housing with future city planning.  Inducing - the principal of relating to city planning to influence city planning development direction.  Negotiate with the development and planning process for more  proper, decentralised city planning .  Peoples housing should be the roots of human settlements in each district, not the other way around.