Bangladesh: Providing safe and affordable housing to low-income communities

IMC is supporting the National Housing Authority to provide secure and affordable housing to low-income communities in Bangladesh.

The Government of Bangladesh has obtained an International Development Association (IDA) credit from the World Bank to finance a project to help low-income people to access secure and affordable housing. It will facilitate the participation of communities living in slums and informal settlements to identify, design and finance housing solutions. 

It is envisioned as a demonstration programme, to test several types of community-driven solutions to resolve tenure issues, invest in critical infrastructure and provide housing finance for the urban poor.

Security of tenure remains an important and unaddressed issue in Bangladesh. However, the presence of recent programmes has provided an important foundation for this project.

IMC is providing the following services:

• Identification and ranking of interested and eligible settlements within each municipality.
• Selection of top eight settlements within each municipality (Comilla, Sirajganj and Narayanganj) using a ‘city wide approach’.
• Assessment of underlying land tenure status of selected settlements and identification of possibilities of securing land tenure, where relevant and feasible.
• Preparation of detailed design and bidding documents for community-based settlement infrastructure.
• Construction supervision of civil works contracts, working closely on-site with conventional and community contractors.
• Ensuring full compliance with IDA’s Environment and Social Safeguard requirements.
•  Establishment of a project office as a Community Support Centre.
• Identification of the next five cities for project expansion.

The work IMC will carry out for the National Housing Authority will build on global examples that have shown that the participation of slum dwellers, together with community architects, engineers and other technical specialists is crucial to the sustainability of equity of slum development projects.