JUL-SEP 2017

INTERNATIONAL EDITION € 15/$ 15

architecture design landscape urban planning

Housing
for all

ISSN 2455-2380

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 change agents>Myanmar
Yangon
Empowering Migrant Communities
to Secure Housing
Banashree Banerjee and Maartje van Eerd take a look at how women’s savings groups helped
migrants resettle in better homes
C ommunity groups in Yangon, Myanmar,
have been instrumental in the setting up
of pilot housing projects. The projects
themselves are small, but they represent a
different way of solving the housing problem for
poor urban migrants in a country that is grappling
with very rapid socio-political changes and
economic liberalisation simultaneously. Above
all, the projects stand out for demonstration
of a down-to-earth collaborative approach, in
which migrant households are supported by a
local NGO, Women for the World (WFW), to
save for housing and procure land collectively.
They then work with young architects to
generate their own settlement designs and
98 | MY LIVEABLE CITY • Jul-Sep 2017
UB-yangon-14.indd 98
incremental housing solutions with a fraction
of the cost incurred in public housing for the
poor in Myanmar. This initiative, to be better
understood, needs to be placed in the wider
context of city development, migration, poverty
and housing options in Yangon.
Promises and challenges of housing poor
migrants in Yangon
“We will establish, as quickly as possible, a
programme for the rehousing of homeless Clockwise, starting from Left:
migrants, who have moved to the cities as a result - A typical family in North
of natural disasters, economic opportunities and Okkalpa project
- Htantapin project
land confiscation.” This is one of the promises - Children in Htantapin
made by the National League for Democracy project
photo: Banashree Banerjee
photo: Banashree Banerjee
photo: Maartje van Eerd
Protesters at the May 14
rally with signs that read:
‘Ramenki District against the
Renovation’
24/06/17 3:17 pm
 (NLD) in its 2015 election manifesto. In one
sentence, the manifesto sums up the development
issues in Myanmar and its resolve to address
the most pressing need in cities: housing
thousands of migrants. Yangon, the largest city,
the erstwhile national capital and business
and industrial centre of Myanmar, has always
attracted its share of migrants, but events in
the last decade have stimulated a huge upsurge
of migration. It began with Cyclone Nargis,
which devastated the Ayeyarwady Delta region
in 2008. Yangon was the obvious destination for
thousands of people who lost their homes and
livelihoods. And then came the withdrawal of
military rule in 2011 after five decades and the
opening up of the country to private and foreign
investment at breakneck speed. Industries,
trade and commerce, resurgence of education
and the accompanying construction, centred
mostly in and around Yangon, continue to
generate job opportunities, attracting migrants
from all over Myanmar.
But the one thing that Yangon does not
offer its steady stream of poor migrants is
housing that they can afford with their low
wages and escalating land prices. The growing
number of people living in informal, insecure
and environmentally precarious situations is
UB-yangon-14.indd 99
testimony to the lack of formal housing options. When the groups
The military regime had tried to cope with the
problem by evicting squatters and relocating have saved
some of them to the city’s fringes. Even enough, they
when public housing was constructed by the set up a housing
Department of Urban and Housing Development
(DUHD), it was never sufficient in relation to
committee, look
the numbers. So, the NLD’s election manifesto for land, buy it
obviously caught the attention of voters by and build their
flagging the importance of housing for migrants. own houses
The NLD came into power with a thumping
majority in the December 2015 national elections
and formed the government in March 2016.
What is the new government doing about
housing migrants in Yangon? Soon after
taking office, the new Yangon Region Chief
Minister gave an interview to Mizzima Weekly
(April 28, 2016) in which he expressed great
concern for “people who have nowhere to live
and nothing to eat.” He emphasised that it is
important to “compile reliable information on
homeless and jobless people in order to help
those people.” He also expressed concern that Clockwise, starting from Top
Left :
building huts informally for migrants has become - Children in Htantapin
a business, creating additional difficulties to project
finding a solution. Finally, he expressed the - Bead embroidery in North
Okkalapa project
determination of his government to solve the - Fire-fighting preparedness
problems. As a starting point, there seems to be in Htantapin project
photo: Maartje van Eerd
photo: Maartje van Eerd
Anna Sorokina with a sign
that reads: ‘The Constitution
is the fundamental law of the
Russian Federation’
photo: Maartje van Eerd
Jul-Sep 2017 • MY LIVEABLE CITY | 99
24/06/17 3:18 pm
 change agents>Myanmar
International trainees from
an IHS course with the
community in North Okkalapa
project
100 | MY LIVEABLE CITY • Jul-Sep 2017
UB-yangon-14.indd 100
photo: Maartje van Eerd
an understanding that evictions will not take
place unless people can be resettled. The new
government has continued the already committed
task of the previous government of building
affordable housing directly and through various
PPP (puplic private partnership) arrangements
in the old top-down supply-driven model. The
pace of projects has been stepped up, but the
scale is still nowhere near the need and, more
importantly, the housing being produced is, by
the government’s own admission, much beyond
the affordability of a vast majority of the city’s
population. The Construction and Housing
Development Bank (CHDB) was set up to make
housing affordable to the poor through credit
schemes. But the poor do not fulfil the loan
eligibility criteria set by the bank.
In the meantime, informal housing continues
to grow rapidly in Yangon. According to DUHD,
there were 153 slum settlements in Yangon
in 2010. A 2016 slum mapping exercise of
UN-Habitat identified 423 settlements with a
population of about 364,315. This is considered
a conservative figure in comparison with the
estimate of Yangon City Development Committee
(YCDC) of 400,000 persons living in informal
settlements without basic services. Most of these
settlements are in the peripheral townships,
inhabited either by migrants or evictees from the
city centre. A typical settlement consists of shacks
made of bamboo mats and recycled material built
on stilts on swampy, low-lying land with a variety
of tenure conditions like insecure renting and
migrants who live in floodable settlements on the
banks of rivers, creeks and drains.
In spite of growing job opportunities
in Yangon and particularly in the suburban
townships, the poverty level is 34% (World Bank).
Many of the poor, particularly migrants, are not
counted or included for government programmes
for housing, health and education, as they are not
registered as residents where they live. Further, a
Save the Children study in three townships (Lives
on Loan, 2016) found, among other vulnerability
indicators, a high level of indebtedness even for
day-to-day survival as well as a large number of
households headed by women.
WFW and the community housing process
In 2004 WFW, the Yangon based NGO, had
already found that squatter communities were
crippled with informal debts, with interest
rates as high as 20%. Many were on the
verge of eviction, having fallen behind on the
relatively high rents demanded by landlords.
WFW convinced slum women from Hlaing
Thar Yar township to counter this exploitation
by developing their own savings groups with
small daily savings of 100 to 200 MMK (1000
Myanmar Kyats or MMK = USD 0.73). Soon,
these women had enough to start distributing
low-interest loans to members of their savings
collective, first towards paying off outstanding
debts and then to buy sewing machines or
livestock, or to make small upgrades to their
homes. The number of savings groups increased
and spread to two other townships.
Then WFW took up the work of rehabilitating
a network of 15 villages devastated by cyclone
Nargis in 2008 with support from the Asian
Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) project.
The experience gained in those villages in setting
up women’s savings groups, establishing rice
banks and rebuilding destroyed houses, roads
and bridges with village communities was the
precursor to taking the leap from supporting
savings groups to land and housing in Yangon.
Again with the assistance of the ACCA
project, WFW acquired the skills to work with
the tools used all over Asia by Asian Coalition for
Housing Rights (ACHR), which implemented
ACCA in 150 cities in 15 Asian countries to
support community groups to find their own
housing solutions. The process starts with
community mapping and forming savings
groups. When the groups have saved enough,
they set up a housing committee, look for land
and buy it and build their own houses. Daw
Van Lizar, the co-founder of WFW asserts that,
“Mapping is a tool for building a community’s
understanding of where they live and for
people to come together and understand – by
working together – what their possibilities are
for building a better community. Group savings
are an effective tool to improve leadership
skills, financial management… it builds trust
within the community, it contributes to team
24/06/17 3:18 pm
 change agents>Myanmar
from farmland to residential. With the expansion
of the city more people started moving into this
area and infrastructure improved with access to
electricity, water and sewerage.
The women’s savings group in the township
consisted of renters living in different wards.
After saving for a year, they got together to form
the housing committee, which was able to find
20,000 sq. ft. (100 x 200) of agricultural land and
despite rising prices, paid only 11 million MMK
(US$ 13,095), with a loan from the City Fund.
The committee selected the poorest households
for the project. Awn Ra, a master’s student
from IHS, found in her research in 2016 that
these households are all from the same ethnic
background; the household size is between
four to six, many are daily wage earners, with
household income ranging between 150,000 to
300,000 MMK. Indebtedness used to be a big
problem till they formed the savings groups.
The women indicated that collective savings
had strengthened them, although managing the
group was not easy. At a certain stage accounting
mistakes and disagreements almost brought
the group to a standstill. But they managed to
learn from their mistakes and moved on with
encouragement and training from WFW.
The community organised a workshop to plan
the layout of the new area and the design of their
new houses with help from community architects
from ACHR. Other squatter communities,
villagers, architects and engineers also attended
the workshop, having seen and heard about the
Pyit Taing Htaung project. The houses were built
with a loan of 700,000 MMK (US$ 883 at that
time) from the City Fund. There are 30 houses
in the project site, which are all 10 x 18 sq. ft in
size arranged in clusters of six houses facing small
lanes and a community hall. All structures are
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UB-yangon-14.indd 102
photo: Banashree Banerjee
photo: Van Lizar
Artist’s Renderings of
Original and Rehabilitated
Micro-rayon.
built with wooden posts and trusses with bamboo Left: Slum in North Okkalapa
mat or plastic sheet walls and corrugated iron Township
Right: Building houses in
roofs. Each house has a toilet behind the house, Hlaing Tar Yar project
with three houses sharing a septic tank. The
houses are built on stilts as the land is floodable,
like in the rest of the ward and most other places
where the poor live. Now the community, among
the poorest in Yangon, is negotiating with the
Cooperative Department of the township for co-
operative tenure and is being helped by the ward
councillor in the process. It is an upwardly mobile
community with homes, jobs and home-based
economic activities.
Learning lessons
There is no doubt that these first community-
planned and community-built urban poor housing
projects demonstrate a new model of collective
secure housing for the poorest landless migrants
in Yangon’s peripheral slums. They materialised
because the women’s savings groups managed
to buy inexpensive land on the city’s periphery
when prices were still relatively low and build
three small projects, with the support of WFW
and ACCA. But since then, land prices have
escalated many times and as of now it has become
impossible for the poor to buy land in the same
way. Can this initiative then provide a way
forward for the vast numbers of the poor who
need secure housing? Perhaps not in the same
way, but there are many lessons here that can
provide a way forward.
Collective savings are a good starting
point for communities to build confidence
and ability to invest in housing and deal
with local authorities to acquire services and
secure tenure. Awn Ra found that the projects
provide tenure security through collective
land ownership and this provided them with
24/06/17 3:18 pm
 building, consensus decision making, team
work, transparency, accountability, literacy,
problem solving, self-reliance and confidence of
marginalised and vulnerable women at the grass-
roots level.” WFW uses a peer learning approach
to multiply savings groups as an essential step
towards social and financial empowerment and
then secure housing. Those who wish to join the
housing committee have to save regularly for a
year. To be eligible, they should be poor and not
own land anywhere. The next step is to look for
cheap land, buy it and start building on it.
WFW used ACCA funding to create the
Yangon City Fund, from which groups could
borrow money on the strength of their own
savings to buy land and build houses. The ACCA
link has also enabled WFW to build the capacity
of savings group members through exchange
visits to countries like Thailand and Sri Lanka.
So far WFW has supported three community
housing projects in Yangon since 2010: 20
families in Hlaing Thar Yar Township, 30 families
in North Okkalapa Township and 48 families in
Htantapin Township as well as another project in
Mandalay.
Zooming in on two projects:
Pyit Taing Htaung housing project in Yoe Lay
Ward, Hlaing Thar Yar Township
The community in Pyit Taing Htaung in Hlaing
Thar Yar Township moved to Yangon after
cyclone Nargis in the Ayeyarwady Delta in
2008. They first moved into Ale Yaw Ward as
squatters, where they were eventually fed up
UB-yangon-14.indd 101
of repeated demolitions. Forming the savings Can this
group helped them come together and look for initiative then
cheap land. They finally found a suitable piece
of agricultural land nearby (just 6,600 sq. ft.) provide a way
after a year of surveying and negotiating with forward for the
the landowner. A loan from the newly set up vast numbers
Yangon City Fund helped them purchase the
land, which was enough for 20 families. Then,
of the poor who
with help from WFW and design support from need secure
community architects from ACHR, the women housing?
designed their new community’s layout plan and
simple inexpensive bamboo and thatch houses,
which they could build with a loan of 700,000
MMK (US$ 833 at that time). It took them three
months to build the houses and put in pathways
and toilets with shared sceptic tanks. The houses
are 15 x 35 sq. ft. each in size and continue to be
improved incrementally by the owners.
PanTha Zin housing project in Hta Won Bae
Ward, North Okkalapa Township
North Okkalapa Township was one of the satellite
towns established in 1959 in the eastern part
of Yangon. Hta Won Bae Ward consisted of
farmland, located outside the city limits, isolated
from it and with underdeveloped infrastructure.
In 1962, 250 evicted squatter families from Clockwise, starting from
Top Left:
Downtown Yangon were able to negotiate Hlaing Tar Yar Township
with the government to get farmlands in the - Mapping vacant land
- Household survey by
ward as part of a relocation package. They then savings group
subdivided the land into smaller plots and sold - Community workshop
it informally or built rooms that they rented out. facilitated by young
architects
Later, the government included Hta Won Bae - Land purchased for the
ward in the urban area and changed its zoning project
photos: Van Lizar
Jul-Sep 2017 • MY LIVEABLE CITY | 101
24/06/17 3:18 pm
 Clockwise, starting from Top:
North Okkalapa project
- Community’s layout drawn
by architects
- Water harvesting
- Windows at floor level
- Carpenter at work

References: Boonyabancha,
S., 2009, Land for housing
the poor-by the poor
themselves: experiences
from the Baan Mankong
Nationwide Slum
Upgrading Programme in
Thailand. Environment
and Urbanization 21 (2),
pp. 309-329. • Mizzima
opportunities to invest in their houses. This is is production of liveable housing for a fraction of Weekly April 28, 2016, Now
in line with literature that states that collective the amount invested in public housing. the hard part: Yangon’s
land tenure also strengthens community Most remarkable is the collaboration between new Chief Minister and the
challenge of development,
processes that can help households to make the the community, architects and the NGO to evolve pp 14-18 • Ra, A., 2016,
challenging transition from informal to formal affordable housing solutions. This is what now Impact of self-help housing
project on the livelihood
and provides protection against market forces brings architecture students to these projects of the beneficiaries: case
(Boonyabancha, 2009). from institutions in Myanmar and other countries study of self-help housing
Small innovations made by people in to learn how to work with poor community project in North Okkalapa
Township, Yangon,
their houses are also worth noting for their groups to evolve design solutions. Myanmar. IHS UMD 12
contribution to improving the quality of life. For With the coming of the new government thesis, Sept 2016. • Save the
instance, windows are placed for the comfort of in Myanmar, there is an interest in looking Children, Myanmar, 2016,
Lives on Loan •World Bank,
people sitting or sleeping on the floor and empty at such housing solutions for the poor and an 2016, Myanmar Economic
plastic bottles are recycled for making water acknowledgement that working with community Monitor. Anchoring
economic expectations.
harvesting arrangements. groups may be a move in the right direction World Bank Group,
And of course the most important consideration towards greater housing sufficiency. December 2016.

Jul-Sep 2017 • MY LIVEABLE CITY | 103

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