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How to use a fund to mobilize a genuinely "people driven" development process in Cambodia

SUPF

Making people the key actors

Since 1993, a close network of professionals, NGOs and community federations in India, Thailand and Philippines, which are part of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) and Slum Dwellers International (SDI), have been assisting poor communities in Phnom Penh to organize themselves and take control of their own development. These efforts have drawn on wisdom, experiences and borrowed tools from many prominent grassroots-driven processes around the Asia region - tools like community enumeration, settlement mapping, model house exhibitions, collective savings and credit and exposure visits to see community-driven initiatives in other countries. All these activities were new to Cambodia, and applying them here involved a lot of trial and error. Some things caught on, and in 1994, the Solidarity for the Urban Poor Federation (SUPF) was established, a city-wide federation of community savings groups.

SUPF and UPDF go together . . .

SUPF is today the only large-scale people’s organization in Phnom Penh. From the beginning, partnership with SUPF has been one of the central elements in UPDF’s work to promote a people-driven development in Cambodia. To break the “hand-out” mentality which has done so much to disempower the country’s poor communities, the UPDF has organized all its activities to strengthen and expand SUPF’s community savings groups as a strategy for people to organize themselves, strengthen their communities, learn from each other and manage their own development. Strong community savings groups - and a large federation of these savings groups - are the building blocks of a people-driven development process and are vitally connected to housing, and environmental improvement and negotiation. When people in poor communities save together and make collective decisions about money, they acquire the management skills and negotiation capacities they’ll need to tackle larger development issues. So boosting savings and credit activities on a large scale in Phnom Penh is a way to boost the basic mechanism by which poor people will begin dealing with their problems collectively, with strength, rather than in weakness and isolation.

UPDF has worked closely with SUFP’s various management committees and its seven district sub-federations (“Khan units”) to bring poor communities within their districts together, pool their own resources and work out their own solutions to problems of land security, housing, toilets, basic services and access to credit for livelihood and housing.

SUPF's impacts over the past 8 years

Savings groups

SUPF has helped poor community members (especially women) to set up, manage and expand community-managed savings and credit groups in nearly half of the city’s poor communities.

Surveys

SUPF has conducted five enumerations and mappings of poor and informal settlements in Phnom Penh - the most comprehensive of any institution in Phnom Penh.

Housing

SUPF has worked with local young professionals to organize projects and design affordable housing types which people can build themselves and which meet their needs and budget constraints.

Model house exhibitions

SUPF has held three exhibitions of full-scale house models to present to the city.

Community-driven relocation

SUPF has helped informal communities to negotiate, plan and carry out community-driven relocation projects in collaboration with the Municipality, international agencies and NGOs.

Collaborative projects

SUPF has collaborated with the Municipality, UNCHS, UPDF, URC, ACHR, SDI on a broad range of workshops, training programs, house-building and environmental improvement projects.

Exchanges
      SUPF has taken part in dozens of regional exchange visits to   community-driven processes in India, Thailand, Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa and Namibia.

SUPF Savings

People's investment in their individual future and in their collective development . . .

Total number of communities with savings groups

185 communities

Total savings members

10,272 members

Total amount saved

280 million Riels
              (US$ 72,000)

Introducing the UPDF HERE

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How to use a fund to mobilize a genuinely people driven development process

Next    6 principals of the UPDF approach and how they work in practice

Next   Using the fund to promote a community driven housing model in Cambodian Cities   - HOUSING LOANS.

Next   Four more cases of UPDF Loans for Housing

Next Using the fund to break the isolation of individual communities through collective projects

Next Using the fund to help decentralize the federation process and boost the district federation units
AND
Using the fund to build a community in difficult circumstance where no community exists yet

Next Using the fund to seed other partnerships and leverage resources from other places

Next   Using the CDS to explore ways of bringing poor communities into the city's planning process

Next Demonstrating that upgrading communities within the city is a viable alternative to relocation

Next How Upgrading Works

Next   2003 Survey of urban poor settlements

Next    UPDF at a Glance

The 5th Anniversary of the UPDF MORE    PICTURES HERE