Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
firms to produce materials, or supports the
artisans with training.
To facilitate self-housing efforts, each of the
three groups must have big overlaps with
the communities – meaning that government
needs to delegate certain powers to a much
lower level as described above. This contrasts
with the status quo whereby the lowest
authority that can approve a building plan
in an urban area is the municipality. The
overlap also represents the grassroots NGOs
actively engaged in community activism and
mobilisation. Such groups remain in touch
with people, understand their needs, dispense
advice, and undertake advocacy on the
community’s behalf. An additional proposal
here is that innovative funding methods that
are embedded in the community be used to
avail credit to people. Here, the Noble-Peace-
Prize-winning GRAMEEN Bank microfinance
model suggests itself as a possibility for
government to work closely with NGOs to get
credit down to the grassroots. In this model,
small loans are given to the very poor people
with no collateral prerequisite. These loans are
coupled with education of the recipients and
strong encouragement to save. Through small
self-organised groups (consisting of family,
neighbours and friends) the loan recipients
support each other in their poverty alleviation
activities. Also, the peer-pressure from the
groups ensures high loan repayment rates.
Compared to providing a finished house,
this micro-credit approach offers obvious
advantages in terms of lower investment as
well as the fact that government eventually
recoups the money. The GRAMEEN model is
also interesting because, although it includes
shelter as one of its aims, it is only incorporated
as part of a broader range of others such as
clean water, basic hygiene and health, smallscale
agriculture, and financial propriety (see
www.grameen-info.org). The government
would need to make funds available on good
terms to kick start and maintain the microcredit
process. This micro-financing model can
bring banking ownership right down to small
communities in the informal settlements so
that they too start accumulating wealth through
savings-based credit creation.
In this proposal also, education institutions
need to leave the comfort of the ivory tower
to start having community presence and to
impact positively on the communities. This
requires a shift from exclusively elitist curricula
to those that are more responsive to the needs
of the majority poor. Community involvement
would require that different disciplines work
together – sociologists, doctors, social
scientists, economists, architects, product
designers and mass-communicators working
with community participation to find ever
innovative ways of imagining, designing,
financing and coordinating the improvement
of human habitats and life quality. Student
projects could start getting them to engage
with the society around them, to apply their
minds to human settlement problems, and to
create and disseminate innovative ideas in
doses communities can digest. In this ethical
role, university education does not just aim at
transmitting knowledge but also at imparting
values to graduates; values that will spur
them into empathising with the indigent. The
young minds can take full advantage of the
self-organising possibilities in the internet
to network with each other and to avail
communities with useable information similar
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