The national process of ACCA is embedded on the well established and close collaborative work between Lumanti Support Group for Shelter, local and national government and poor communities in Nepal. This partnership has resulted in remarkable changes the areas of settlement upgrading through improved access to water sanitation facilities, housing, easy community based finance and linkage with local and national governments. 

 

With this strong base, ACCA programme was initiated in Bharatpur in 2009 and was expanded to other municipalities. ACCA programme is now implemented in 8 other cities namely Biratnagar, Birgunj, Kohalpur, Ratnanagar and was most recently initiated in Dharan, Kalaiya, Thecho and Thankot. Partial support was also provided for Integrated Shelter Support Programme for Koshi Flood Affected Landless Communities, which was conceived to rehabilitate 235 families displace from their homes by Koshi Flood. 

 

There have been significant achievements in terms of settlement upgrading and building, better coordination among the concerned stakeholders at the local level in all of these cities. The people, who were previously shunned by the local government and the political bodies, now have improved linkage with them. Through this, they have now increased access to basic facilities such as water, sanitation, pathways, drainage, community centers and many more. With this improved relationship and coordination with the municipalities, the communities have managed to leverage additional resources and this in turn has contributed in scaling up the projects in the cities. The local governments have now started to allocate funds from their development budget to upgrade the conditions in urban poor communities in their respective cities.

 

There have been a number of exchange visits between the communities and also between the cities, thus networking between them has strengthened. The projects and the process are completely community led, the community members are responsible for developing, planning, implementing and monitoring the projects. In the whole process, women have played the pivotal role in decision making whether it is in designing a model house or it is in taking responsibility of timely repayment of the housing loans. This has assisted in enhancing the community leadership and other skills within the communities.

 

This is not just limited to a handful of community leaders but communities as a whole. The most important and key accomplishment in this entire process is that the poor in the cities have gained access to secure land tenure, that too with consensus of political and government bodies. The establishment of Urban Community Support Fund (UCSF) in two new cities besides Kathmandu and Birgunj (Bharatpur, Kalaiya) has ensured a significant space for urban poor communities in the city development process. New innovative projects, innovative financial mechanisms which are community-led are now being initiated in these cities. Communities and people are more empowered and are capable to develop their own projects which can be implemented in the ground and negotiate for their right to live in the city. 

The project is supported by Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) in Bangkok.