Japan’s 6,000 Buraku communities have faced centuries of institutionalized discrimination, isolation and impoverishment. When government programs were introduced in the 1960s to right some of those wrongs, the Asaka Buraku community was one of the first to take advantage of them, to completely redevelop their dilapidated  riverside community and improve their incomes and social support systems.  In the process, this pioneering community inspired other Burakus around Japan to rebuild, and spearheaded a larger community-led redevelopment in their own polluted, industrialized neighborhood.

In this project, in a small timber-cutting town in the mountains of north-central Mongolia, ten families got together and completely rebuilt their dilapidated workers housing, using energy-efficient techniques, on land provided free by the government.

Until recently, Mongolia was  a country of fiercely independent nomadic cattle herders who were unaccustomed to living in close proximity to others. But now those nomadic traditions are breaking down and people are living in more crowded and more urbanized situations.  Mongolians are having to develop new skills for working with their neighbors to meet the many needs they can’t meet individually.  This small project, in which a group of 69 families worked together to upgrade their dilapidated “barracks” housing, was an important step towards building new systems of friendship and mutual help. 

This little housing project for 30 poor families of squatters and room-renters, in Yangon's North Okkalapa Township, was the second to be built by women savings group members, with support from Women for the World.

Since 2009, some of Yangon’s poorest women squatters have been coming together, starting savings groups and developing their own housing solutions, with support from a small NGO called Women for the World. Using their savings, they have collectively bought tracts of inexpensive agricultural land, subdivided them into small plots and built their own extremely low-cost houses, with basic infrastructure. They have now built a dozen projects which provide secure, affordable housing to a thousand vulnerable families.  Taw Win was the first project for which they were able to obtain loans from a microfinance company.