Focus on: Mohishakundu Shordarpara in Bengladesh

13 April 2022Updated 13 October 2022

A small housing project with a big impact

Every week, the CoHabitat Network introduces you to a collaborative housing project documented on the cohabitat.io database.

Mohishakundu Shordarpara is a beautiful little housing project in a low-caste slum in the provincial city of Jhenaidah. It's having a big impact in a country that is starved for examples of community-driven housing.

It shows how much even very poor, marginalized community people - and especially women - can do to design and build solid, comfortable, low-cost houses for themselves, when they have a little sensitive support from community architects and are allowed to control the money and the project themselves. This much-visited project is helping to show many in Bangladesh that people-driven housing works.

The Mohishakundu Shordarpara community, which is in the city's Chaklapara neighborhood, was first established during the British colonial period, in the 1860s, after the great indigo revolt. Nowadays, the community members work as day laborers, van drivers, rickshaw pullers and agricultural laborers.

The housing process transformed the environment of the community and the neighborhood which surrounds it dramatically. Before the project, the people's fragile mud houses and flimsy roofs were not strong enough to withstand strong winds, and living in those houses during the monsoon and winter seasons was very difficult. To many in the city, Mohishakundu Shordarpara was simply another slum.

During a participatory evaluation of the project, one of the community leaders, Sharifa Akter, said: “People don’t call our community a slum anymore, though we are the same people living in the same area. But now we live in better houses that we built by ourselves.”

The outcome of this collective effort is rooted the strength of doing something together. That collective strength has brought about a transformation in people's social, psychological and communal well-being.

▶ More infos on cohabitat.io