Evolution of Participatory and Support Based Approach for Strengthening Tenure Security, Housing and Community Resilience

The Urban Partnership for Poverty Reduction (UPPR) Project is the largest poverty reduction project in Bangladesh perhaps in the whole region. UPPR works in partnership with communities and local government institutions in 23 towns and cities across the country to build capacity of the poor people to identify their needs and tackles those by themselves with the support of UPPR project. The project was targeted to reach three million poor people within six years from 2009 to 2015. Output number 2 of the project has emphasized the importance of security of tenure of the poor families for the sustainability of project interventions and communities. On behalf of the Government of Bangladesh the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) with UNDP implement the project. UN Habitat is responsible for the implementation of output two of the project. One of the key assumptions of the project was that both formal and informal tenure would be respected in the process of project implementation. An international consultant was hired to develop a strategy for improving the tenure security of the urban poor and to implement the proposed strategy in selected project towns as pilot initiatives while keeping the project‘s emphasize on reaching the extreme poor families through the provision of various socio-economic and infrastructure assistances to project towns. Over a period of six years, the UPPR has developed several workable arrangements for improving the tenure security of communities in selected towns and cities.