Savings and Funds and Land for Housing

This is a special issue of the Housing by People in Asia newsletter on the funds that poor communities put together and manage themselves – and why these are so central to development (and within this to poverty reduction). As the text points out, these are forms of finance that start growing from the ground, from people’s own resources and that they control (unlike most external funding). When finance grows from poor communities’ own resources, they think what they would like to do – and then do it. This may start modestly but this kind of finance system has the power to gather people together (and achieves what this publication terms “trickle-up”).

This publication includes:
· a discussion of community funds and how they work;
· details of the work of the Women’s Bank in Sri Lanka, whose savings and loans programme has more than 60,000 members (this also includes details of its work supporting the inhabitants of the tsunami-hit areas);
· community savings by Mahila Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation in India, which includes a discussion of why they save and what they save for;
· community savings in Thailand and the work of the Community Organizations Development Institute (which also serves as an update to the paper in Environment & Urbanization (2005), Vol 17, No 1 by Somsook Boonyabancha);
· community savings in Cambodia and the work of the Urban Poor Development Fund;
· the role of collective savings and loans in building the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines;
· the development of community savings in Nepal and the Urban Community Support Fund;
· community savings and the different community funds in Vietnam;
· women’s savings groups in Lao PDR and the development of district funds;
· the development of savings groups in Mongolia and how the savings process works there – and the new Community Development Fund; and
· community savings in Indonesia and Fiji.

It ends with a summary of community savings in urban areas of Asia, which have 1.8 million members and the equivalent of US$ 66 million in savings, and also a quote from Jockin Arputham:

“One community dollar equals 1,000 development dollars. Why? Because the community dollar represents the commitment of thousands of poor people to their own development. Without the direct commitment of a savings scheme, people can participate in any kind of development freebie that comes along. But when development comes from people’s own savings, it’s theirs, they own it. Without this, development and improvements have no meaning.”