Finance as the key to unlocking community potential: savings, funds and the ACCA programme

Abstract

This paper describes how the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) programme seeks to use finance to augment community-driven development processes in 19 nations and enable their scaling up to the city and national levels. The lack of accessible and flexible finance is a key stumbling block for the majority of community development processes in Asia. The paper begins by examining how this programme approaches the issue of finance in the wider context of community-driven upgrading, and elaborates the role that community networks can play in encouraging collective activities. It then explains how community finance leads to the establishment of community development funds (CDFs), financial platforms made up of contributions from different sources, including community savings, ACCA seed funds and contributions from local/ national government or other actors. These both encourage collaboration and increase the scale of what can be done. The paper gives examples of how CDFs can operate at different levels: locally, between groups of communities with shared problems and goals; on a citywide scale (107 citywide funds are now in operation); or at a national level, as in the Philippines, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

City development fund: A financial mechanism to support housing and livelihood needs of Thailand's urban poor

“…The CDF in Thailand was the second wave of development and it was a distinctly community-driven approach (CODI, 2012b). As discussed by Archer (2012), the success of the Thai CDFs was perhaps facilitated by the familiarity of the Thai urban poor with the community-driven approaches such as the Baan Mankong program. The Thai CDFs worked closely with Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), and are very interested in exchanging experiences with other SDI affiliates (Mitlin, 2008).…”

“…It used financing as an effective instrument to augment community-driven processes in 19 nations (Archer, 2012). By 2012, ACCA helped establish city-level community funds in 107 cities in Asia, including several in Thailand (Archer, 2012). However, savings in Asian countries reached maturity in the last 15 years.…”

“…A particularly successful program is that of the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA). It used financing as an effective instrument to augment community-driven processes in 19 nations (Archer, 2012). By 2012, ACCA helped establish city-level community funds in 107 cities in Asia, including several in Thailand (Archer, 2012).…”

“…Community-based finance typically organizes households to save and borrow for the development, construction, and maintenance of housing (Ferguson & Smets, 2010). However, community-based finance can be operated in various forms including credit unions, cooperatives (UnitedNations, 1991), community savings groups, community funds (ACHR, 2008;Archer, 2012), or government programs such as the Community Mortgage Programme in the Philippines (Ferguson & Smets, 2010). According to UN-Habitat (2007), community funding is an innovative way of financing housing, in addition to government funding, shelter micro-finance, and the private sector.…”

A Blue Urban Agenda: Adapting to Climate Change in the Coastal Cities of Caribbean and Pacific Small Island Developing States

“…There has been some experience of pooling savings. For example, in Asia, low-income communities set up City Development Funds from which they can draw loans for disaster rehabilitation, among other needs (Archer, 2012). Von Ritter and Black-Layne (2013) explored the possible role of micro-financing and crowd-funding to support local climate change action, such as financing small decentralised energy solutions or climate-proofing homes.…”