THIS BRIEF PUBLICATION is a newsletter of the Urban Poor Development F und in Cambodia. This initiative has existed since 1998, as a joint venture of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR), Phnom Penh Municipality and the Solidarity and Urban Poor Federation (SUPF). Like other members of this Federation, the group has created a revolving fund that provides affordable credit for housing and income generation to poor communities. The Cambodian group, with only two full-time staff members, has benefited almost 4,000 households through the disbursement of over US$ 600,000 in small loans. But making credit available is not the only objective. Money, according to the philosophy of this group and others like it, is a powerful tool when decisions about its use become a way of bringing people together. Funds like this, managed by local people, can build their capacity to manage their own development, and can strengthen their hand in dealing with the state or with local authorities. As UPDF itself points out, it is hard to imagine a more difficult context than the one in which it operates. Decades of upheaval have torn communities apart and, unlike Thailand and Vietnam, the country still has no formal support systems for the poor. It has foreign aid, which has made a significant contribution, but has left little space for the urban poor to develop their own solutions to the challenges they face.

This newsletter is an update on UPDF’s activities, but it is also a manifesto of sorts and a set of practical guidelines for establishing and managing this kind of community fund. It outlines the principles of the UPDF approach, and describes a range of ways in which a community fund can be used, for instance, to promote a community-driven housing model, to break the isolation of individual communities through collective projects, to build community in difficult circumstances where no community exists yet, to seed other partnerships, and leverage other resources. The highly graphic, clearly presented projects are impressive in their energy, their range and their capacity to apply practical lessons drawn from experience.