Empowering Migrant Communities

Community 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 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 migrants, who have moved to the cities as a result of natural disasters, economic opportunities and land confiscation.” This is one of the promises made by the National League for Democracy (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 testimony to the lack of formal housing options. The military regime had tried to cope with the problem by evicting squatters and relocating some of them to the city’s fringes. Even when public housing was constructed by the Department of Urban and Housing Development (DUHD), it was never sufficient in relation to the numbers. So, the NLD’s election manifesto obviously caught the attention of voters by flagging the importance of housing for migrants. 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 building huts informally for migrants has become a business, creating additional difficulties to finding a solution. Finally, he expressed the determination of his government to solve the problems. As a starting point, there seems to be 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 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 of repeated demolitions. Forming the savings group helped them come together and look for cheap land. They finally found a suitable piece of agricultural land nearby (just 6,600 sq. ft.) after a year of surveying and negotiating with the landowner. A loan from the newly set up Yangon City Fund helped them purchase the land, which was enough for 20 families. Then, with help from WFW and design support from community architects from ACHR, the women 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 Downtown Yangon were able to negotiate with the government to get farmlands in the ward as part of a relocation package. They then subdivided the land into smaller plots and sold it informally or built rooms that they rented out. 

Later, the government included Hta Won Bae ward in the urban area and changed its zoning 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 built with wooden posts and trusses with bamboo mat or plastic sheet walls and corrugated iron roofs. Each house has a toilet behind the house, 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 materialized 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 opportunities to invest in their houses. This is in line with literature that states that collective land tenure also strengthens community processes that can help households to make the challenging transition from informal to formal and provides protection against market forces (Boonyabancha, 2009).

Small innovations made by people in their houses are also worth noting for their contribution to improving the quality of life. For instance, windows are placed for the comfort of people sitting or sleeping on the floor and empty plastic bottles are recycled for making water harvesting arrangements. And of course, the most important consideration is production of liveable housing for a fraction of the amount invested in public housing.

Most remarkable is the collaboration between the community, architects and the NGO to evolve affordable housing solutions. This is what now brings architecture students to these projects from institutions in Myanmar and other countries to learn how to work with poor community groups to evolve design solutions.

With the coming of the new government in Myanmar, there is an interest in looking at such housing solutions for the poor and an acknowledgement that working with community groups may be a move in the right direction towards greater housing sufficiency.

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 Weekly April 28, 2016, Now the hard part: Yangon’s new Chief Minister and the challenge of development, pp 14-18 • Ra, A., 2016, Impact of self-help housing project on the livelihood of the beneficiaries: case study of self-help housing project in North Okkalapa Township, Yangon, Myanmar. IHS UMD 12 thesis, Sept 2016. • Save the Children, Myanmar, 2016, Lives on Loan •World Bank, 2016, Myanmar Economic Monitor. Anchoring economic expectations. World Bank Group, December 2016.