Unplanned housing developments in vulnerable communities on steep tropical and subtropical hillslopes in many developing countries pose major problems for the residents themselves; for Governments, in terms of potential relocation costs; for engineers in determining the precise nature of the hazard and risk; and for donor agencies, such as the World Bank, in establishing the form of disaster mitigation policies that should be promoted. We present a new low-cost, community-based approach to landslide risk reduction in such a context. It is founded on the vision that there is often sufficient capacity within Governments to address such landslide issues without needing to incur significant additional costs by employing non-Government specialist staff. Such expenditure adds to debt and only suboptimally builds within-country capacity. The approach we present develops a cross-ministry Government management team, implements a community-based approach to landslide risk assessment, develops low-cost interventions through the social intervention fund and builds capacity through community knowledge transfer. We report on the successful pilot undertaken in the Skate Town community,