This large housing project for 264 poor families of squatters and room-renters, in Yangon's Shwepyitha Township, was the first to be built under the new collaborative Mae Myit Thar housing scheme, in which the government provided free land to allow the collective and community-driven housing model already developed in 12 other projects to scale up, with support from the local NGO Women for the World.

In this large collective housing project in one of Yangon’s industrializing suburbs, a group of poor women squatters and room renters worked with a small NGO called Women for the World to design and build their own extremely low-cost houses, on land that was given to them free by the Yangon Regional Government, on long-term collective user rights.  The project was the second to bring a collective and community-driven delivery model into the government’s program of low-cost housing for the poor, and represented a dramatic scaling up of the self-help housing model that had already been pioneered in twelve earlier projects. 

This housing project made history in many ways.  It was Nepal’s first-ever community-planned and community-managed resettlement project for squatters who were evicted to make way for a public infrastructure project.   It  was also the first time that substantial municipal funds were invested in a jointly-managed fund that  would finance this first project, and then revolve to finance other initiatives by poor communities in Kathmandu.  The  project showed how collaboration, flexible finance and the development force of communities themselves can solve a city’s housing problems in fast, simple and inexpensive ways.  

This is the first-ever community-led upgrading project in Bharatpur, and the city’ s first case of an informal community being given secure tenure rights to the public land they occupy.  The project was a learning opportunity for the whole city.  With help from a team of community architects, the people developed low-cost plans to rebuild their mud and thatch houses, upgrade the infrastructure and negotiate with the Forestry Department, which owns the land, to get subsidized timber, which many used to construct their new houses.  The project is much visited and has inspired similar projects in several other cities.
 

In the remote city of Kalaiya, Nepal, numerous poor families live in mud and thatch houses without basic services. However, in the community of Bhaura, a remarkable transformation occurred. Through the collective endeavors of the community, the municipality, and supporting organizations, 30 families rebuilt their homes from scratch on the same land. This project became a catalyst for innovation, by embracing cost-effective and sustainable construction techniques, such as compressed earth blocks. The success of the Bhaura housing project has not gone unnoticed, inspiring similar initiatives in different corners of the city.