Focus on: Mae Myit Thar collective housing project

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

In this large collective housing project in one of Yangon’s industrializing suburbs, a group of women squatters and room renters worked with a small NGO called Women for the World to design and build their own extremely low-cost houses, on land that was given to them free by the Yangon Regional Government, on long-term collective user rights.

The project was the first to bring a collective and community-driven delivery model into the government’s program of low-cost housing for the poor, and represented a dramatic scaling up of the self-help housing model that had already been pioneered in twelve earlier projects.

Over the last ten years, Women for the World has been mobilizing and supporting Yangon's poorest women squatters and room renters to come together, set up their own savings groups and develop their own solutions to the serious housing problems they face.

A couple of design workshops were organized in June and July 2019, which brought together the scattered members of the new community, leaders from earlier collective housing projects and local carpenters.

The project was built mainly by skilled carpenters who had worked on the earlier collective housing projects. Experienced members of the women's savings network helped the new community to purchase building materials, supervise the construction and manage the work-site. Things went fast: it took just over two months to build all 264 houses and the community center!

On January 2020, families start moving into their new houses. The settlement is filled with busy people putting finishing touches on their houses, painting facades and planting trees and flowers.

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