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Somsook Boonyabancha, former director of CODI (the Community Organizations Development Institute in Thailand) and now an advisor to the CODI board and chairperson of the Baan Mankong Program Committee, reflects on the evolution of CODI, the management of its fund, and the communitydriven activities it has supported since 1992. The paper explains how substantial and large-scale changes can be brought about in the lives of the poor by supporting a community-driven process that opens space for negotiation and collaboration with government and other partners on housing and other aspects of community development. It describes the transitions that have had to be managed, as both the community networks and the support institution have navigated various challenges and opportunities. A centrepiece of this co-production is the Baan Mankong Program, which represents a dramatic change in the role of government-from a provider of housing to facilitator of community-driven local housing co-production. KeywOrDs Baan Mankong / co-production / CODI / Thailand / urban housing I. IntrODuCtIOn Since the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) in Thailand was set up in 1992, it has been engaged in continuous learning about how substantial change in the lives of the poor can be brought about through a process that opens space for poor communities to work with their local governments and other public and private stakeholders to deliver various development goods. Although co-production, as a term and a concept, was not familiar in Thai development until decades later, CODI's work has manifested the principles of co-production all along, most notably in the delivery of housing-that toughest and most complex of public goods. But the co-production mechanisms CODI helped build have also addressed and linked together many other dimensions of poverty.

This paper presents the findings of a two-year study of community finance systems (including community-based savings and loan groups, and larger city-based funds) that are operated by established urban poor community organizations in five Asian countries (Cambodia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand), with support from their partner organizations. These five groups are the principal national urban poor organizations in their respective countries, and their community savings and city funds-as well as their other development initiatives-have all grown to national scale. The study, in which the chief researchers, data-gatherers and analysts were community members themselves, was managed by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR). It was conceived as an opportunity to look in greater detail at the different models of community finance these important groups have developed, in their very different national contexts, and to compare their various aspects, draw out some key elements and lessons, and see how these people-driven finance systems can be strengthened, scaled up and brought into the formal finance and development structures in their countries.

Urban food security, or its lack, is attracting growing interest in global policy debates. Glaringly missing in these conversations, however, are the voices of the urban poor. To fill this gap, grassroots community organizations, with decades-long experience collecting data on their own communities and taking action to improve conditions, decided to ask the urban poor in Cambodia and Nepal how they define and measure food security, what key challenges they face in the daily struggle to put food on the table and what actions might help. Their findings show that access to adequate diets is a major challenge for low-income communities in Asia, and that hunger is widespread, although with great variations and fluctuations between and within households. They also highlight the extraordinary resilience of urban poor women and their multiple strategies to stretch meagre budgets and make sure there is something to eat, even though sometimes this is not enough.

This paper describes how urban poor community leaders in six nations (Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam) worked together to define poverty, assess its causes, and suggest how best to measure it and address it. Their work drew on over a thousand detailed household expenditure surveys from different settlements in a range of cities in the six nations. Five distinct groups could be distinguished among these urban poor households, and the work suggested that two poverty lines were needed. The community leaders also reviewed national and international poverty lines and found these to be incompatible with reality, especially the US$ 1.25/person/day poverty line. The paper draws some conclusions and describes plans for the country teams to further this work, including engaging with their national governments over the definition and measurement of urban poverty.