The Berkana Institute

The Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) in Thailand

(David Satterthwaite's Brief summary of longer paper, June 2004)

The Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) is a Thai government agency formed in 2000 through the merging of the Urban Community Development Office (UCDO) and the Rural Development Fund. CODI is an independent public organization under the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. CODI is implementing Baan Mankong, the Thai government’s ambitious national programme for upgrading and secure tenure which is described in a separate box. This box summarizes the work of the Urban Community Development Office (UCDO) in addressing poverty and how this fed into CODI and into Baan Mankong.

UCDO was set up by the government of Thailand in 1992 to address urban poverty. It was widely recognized in government that Thailand’s economic success during the 1980s and early 1990s had brought little benefit to the poorest groups. Indeed, for many, their housing conditions had deteriorated and their settlements were at ever-greater risk of eviction as land prices and demand for central city sites increased. There was also a recognition of the need to develop more participatory models of support for low-income groups and of the possibilities of doing so through supporting community-based savings and credit groups. Various local and international NGOs working in Thailand had also demonstrated the possibilities of improving housing by working with low-income communities and networks of communities.

UCDO was provided with a capital base equivalent to US$ 50 million, to allow it to make loans available to organized communities to undertake a range of activities relating to land acquisition and housing construction, housing improvement, and income generation. UCDO recognized that for pro-poor development to take place, relations between low-income groups and the state had to change. Critical to that change was the establishment of representative and accountable local citizen organizations.

From the outset, UCDO sought to bring together different interest groups – with its Board having senior government staff, academics and community representatives. Initially, loans were available to community-based savings and loan groups for income generation, revolving funds, housing (for instance, to allow communities threatened with eviction to purchase existing slum land or land elsewhere and develop housing there) and housing improvement. Any community could receive any of these loans,provided they could show that they had the capacity to manage savings and loans. The loan could be used to respond to the particular needs of each group. Through this, UCDO developed links with a wide range of community organizations, savings groups, NGOs and government organizations. Loans had much lower interest rates than the other loan sources that urban poor households could turn to, although they were also high enough to allow the initial fund to be sustained and to cover administrative costs.

From support to communities to support for community networks: As the savings groups that worked with UCDO became more numerous and larger, UCDO found it more difficult to provide support to individual groups and to be the centre of all the problem solving, for problem cases. This difficulty in scaling up its work brought UCDO into a new stage of change in which it linked individual savings groups together in
the form of networks or federations. UCDO loans could be provided not only to communities but also to community networks who then on-lent to their member organizations. The emergence of large-scale community networking brought immense change to community-led development processes in general and to UCDO and CODI in particular. These networks became increasingly the means through which the
funds of UCDO (and then CODI) are made available to low-income groups. Community organizations in a particular city or province join together to form a network to work together and negotiate with city or provincial authorities, or to influence development planning, or simply to work together on sharedproblems of housing, livelihoods or access to basic services. There are networks based around occupations (for instance a taxi cooperative), pooled savings and cooperative housing. There are also community networks based on shared land tenure problems (for instance, networks of communities living along railway tracks or under bridges who have shared tenure or landlord problems). As networks manage loans, this also decentralizes the decision-making process so it is closer to individual communities and better able to respond rapidly and flexibly to opportunities identified by network members.