64 Cities in Asia; First Year Report of the Asian Coalition for Community Action Programme

The Asian Coalition for Housing Rights has a new programme – the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA). This provides funds to catalyze and support citywide upgrading, and this booklet reports on what has been done and achieved in each of the 64 cities that are part of the programme (which targets 200–250 cities). It also explains why ACCA was launched and what underpinned it, how it works, how community finance supports it, the surveys and information gathering that underpin each initiative, and the larger city and regional processes to which it contributes. There is also a complete list of all funding approved. The report follows the long-established tradition of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights of making its reports very readable and accessible and illustrated with many colour photos and graphics. There are also boxes that help explain some of the key concepts – for instance, why the programme seeks to work at scale from day one and why it sets very modest budget ceilings for supporting most activities (and leaves it to the implementing communities to work out how best to use the funds and raise further funding). It explains the principal of “insufficiency”, because there is not enough development funding to “sufficiently” meet the needs of informal settlements. So:

“The US$ 3,000 for small upgrading projects and the US$ 40,000 for big housing projects that the ACCA programme offers community groups is pretty small money but it is available money, it comes with very few strings attached and it’s big enough to make it possible for communities to think big and to start doing something actual: the drainage line, the paved walkway, the first 50 new houses. It will not be sufficient to resolve all the needs or to reach everyone. But the idea isn’t for communities to be too content with that small walkway they’ve just built, even though it may be a very big improvement. Even after the new walkway, the people in that community will still be living in conditions that are filled with all kinds of ‘insufficiencies’ – insufficient basic services, insufficient houses, insufficient land tenure security and insufficient money […] the ACCA money is small but it goes to as many cities and groups as possible, where it generates more possibilities, builds more partnerships, unlocks more local resources and creates a much larger field of learning and a much larger pool of new strategies and unexpected outcomes.” (page 9)