- COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND ACTION
How Communities Organize Themselves
Kenneth Fernandes (compilor). 1997, 115 pages, ISBN: 969 838001 9. Published by and available from City Press, A-16, Safari Heights, Block 15, Gulistan-e-Jauhar, Karachi 75290, Pakistan: e-mail: aaj@biruni.erum. com.pk
THIS BOOK DESCRIBES a set of initiatives
by low-income communities in Karachi (Pa-kistan) whose residents have sought to im-prove their living conditions by way of self-help activities and who have organized them-selves to lobby government agencies for the provision of infrastructure to fulfill their ba-sic needs with the support of the Urban Re-sources Centre (URC). This book may be use-ful to anyone working with community de-velopment in the Third World and wishing to draw on the experience of how other com-munities have undergone independent or-ganization.
In the foreword, the chair of the Urban Book Notes
Resource Centre describes how the local gov-ernment in Karachi neither includes low-in-come communities in planning nor consults them about projects that are implemented around them. The role of the Centre is to analyze formal sector plans and to help the communities which will be adversely affected to develop alternatives. This usually includes putting them in contact with similar commu-nities in informal forums in order to share information and experiences. With this work. the Centre seeks to promote a better under-standing of development issues relating to low-income groups within NGOs and formal sector planning agencies.
The book begins by highlighting Karachi’s major problems which include housing short-ages, illegal settlements, water shortages, lack of provision of sanitation. and also cov-ers the issues of health, education and trans-port. It describes government responses to low-income groups, whereby the inner-city poor have been resettled away from the city centre and do not benefit from government housing programmes. The changing relation-ship between the people and the state is also described, whereby people are increasingly conscious of their civil rights and, through the lobbying of government agencies, have forced these to respond to their basic needs. Government bodies are also hampered by misappropriation of funds, poorly trained officials and bureaucratic structures.
The book then describes how communities come together to form community based or-ganizations (CBOs) to tackle their problems.
The structure and leadership of organized communities and the strategies they use to obtain basic services from government agen-cies, including bargaining power with politi-cians, are examined. These organizations use innovative ways to tackle their problems and formal sector organizations should note how communities have tackled the issues affect-ing them and how self-help efforts could be integrated into formal sector planning. The book points out how community based or-ganizations are in need of financial, techni-cal and social support from the formal sec-tor in order to function effectively.
The subsequent sections of the book de-scribe some of the community initiatives as examples, drawing on experiences from Orangi. Lyari and Manzoor, and are narrated
by community participants themselves. Ref-erence is made to problems such as land ten-ure and eviction, lack of provision for water, electricity, transport and education, and how the community (including women’s and youth groups) tackled them through self-organiza-tion. The community members discuss the issues of leadership and group political force, legal processes and dealing with bureauc-racy. The book concludes with a short sum-mary of the main points arising from the study which, the Urban Resource Centre hopes, can be used as lessons in other projects.
