Supplementary written evidence submitted
by the Development Planning Unit, UCL
A NOTE ON COMMUNITY INFORMATION WITHIN CODI'S
WORK
PREPARED BY
RUTH MCLEOD,
DEVELOPMENT PLANNING
UNIT, UCL FOR
THE INTERNATIONAL
DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
The Community Organisation Development Institute
(CODI) implements a nationwide community upgrading programme in
Thailand. CODI extends loans to organised communities for settlement
upgrading including land acquisition, housing improvement, housing
construction, infrastructure installation and livelihood based
activities. Communities are also encouraged to form networks.
Some of these are city or regionally based. Others are linked
to a specific livelihood base or a common kind of location. For
example communities living along river banks formed a network,
as did taxi drivers. The one thing that all these communities
and their networks shared in common is a base in community savings
and loans.
In January 2003 a new programme—the
Baan Maankong Programme[90]
(BMP)—was launched with a target to achieve 200 cities
without slums within five years. CODI has the responsibility of
overseeing that programme and is currently working in 230 cities,
still basing it work around a fundamental principle of working
with community based savings and loan groups.
Information generated by communities themselves
provides the basis for planning all the initiatives that receive
loans. People make a survey of their existing slum communities—how
many people live there. Each community in the network decides
what the survey is good for and that goes up on the community
board—the details about what questions will be asked, how
they will be asked, what the forms will look like, who will ask
the questions. Then there is a need for checking the information
when it is collected by people. It's not a highly technical survey
but it provides the basic information about who's there. As projects
are implemented plans are put up in community halls including
all the expenditure. People are able to see how costs are working
out, who is repaying and who is behind. Making this comprehensive
range of information openly available is an excellent way to counter
attempts at corruption and bribery.
90 See CODI Update No. 5, March 2008 for a comprehensive
overview of 50 projects support within the Baan Mankong Programme.
www.codi.or.th Back
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