SDI ACHR and UNCHS
welcome Prime Minister Hun Sen
to 5th Anniversary Celebrations of the UPDF
The Urban
Poor Development Fund
was set up in March, 1998 as a joint venture of the Penh
Penh, the Solidarity and Urban Poor Federation (SUPF) and the Asian
Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR).
The idea was to create a
revolving fund which would provide affordable credit to poor communities
for housing and income generation,
through their savings groups and federations, and use the fund to pool
efforts in partnership and development. The fund is governed by a "mixed" board (which includes a majority of community leaders,
with representatives from the Municipality, ACHR, NGOs and other
development agencies) and managed by a small support staff, with as
little bureaucracy and as much flexibility as possible.
UPDF’s task is to use
its small resources of money strategically to make other things
happen - it’s not just a matter of providing micro-credit.
Money can be a powerful tool, and if money - and decisions about how
money is used - is channeled in ways which bring people in communities
together, it can be a potent people’s process booster. When poor
people see clearly that a fund is available to them, and that it
supports what they are doing, it
can strengthen their hand in negotiations with the state for land,
services and access to other resources, and strengthen their capacity to
manage their own development process.
It’s hard to imagine a
more difficult context than the one in which UPDF operates. Decades of
war, political upheaval and unspeakable hardship have torn communities
apart in Cambodia, scattered people across the country and obliterated
their links with the past. As the country gets back on its feet and
money pours into it’s capital city’s free-wheeling economy, poor
migrants from the provinces are drawn to the city for jobs in the
new factories, on the construction sites and in the burgeoning service
and tourism sectors. For the poor, Phnom Penh is a city of hope and
opportunity, but when it comes to finding decent, affordable places to
live, most have no option but to build shacks in the city’s 550-odd
informal settlements, on open land, and along roadsides,
railway tracks, canals and rivers, where conditions are unhealthy and
insecure.
Cambodia, unlike its
neighbors Thailand and Vietnam, still has no formal support systems for
the poor: no housing board, no ministry of housing, no legislative
mechanisms for regularizing informal settlements, no government programs
to provide basic services or to support people’s efforts to improve
conditions in their settlements. There is no housing finance to any
sector - poor or middle class. And the municipality, which has been
overburdened with challenges such as flood control, crime and economic
development, has had difficulty responding to the needs of the city’s
growing poor population. On the other hand, Cambodia has been the target
of innumerable international agencies and a great deal of development
aid, which intervenes in virtually every conceivable sector of the
country’s development and governance. All this foreign aid and
expertise has certainly done many good things for Cambodia, but it has
left little space for the urban poor to build their organizations and to
explore their own solutions to the problems they face.
May 24 2003
Prime Minister Hun Sen at the 5 Year Anniversary
Celebrations for UPDF
