This paper describes the work of an alliance formed by three civic organizations
in Mumbai to address poverty - the NGO SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers
Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women’s
savings groups. It highlights key features of their work which include: putting
the knowledge and capacity of the poor and the savings groups that they form at
the core of all their work (with NGOs in a supporting role); keeping politically
neutral and negotiating with whoever is in power; driving change through setting
precedents (for example, a community-designed and managed toilet, a house design
developed collectively by the urban poor that they can build far cheaper than
public or private agencies) and using these to negotiate support and changed
policies (a strategy that develops new “legal” solutions on
the poor’s own terms); a horizontal structure as the Alliance is
underpinned by, accountable to and serves thousands of small savings groups
formed mostly by poor women; community-to-community exchange visits that root
innovation and learning in what urban poor groups do; and urban poor groups
undertaking surveys and censuses to produce their own data about
“slums” (which official policies lack and need) to help
build partnerships with official agencies in ways that strengthen and support
their own organizations. The paper notes that these are features shared with
urban poor federations and alliances in other countries and it describes the
international community exchanges and other links between them. These groups are
internationalizing themselves, creating networks of globalization from below.
Individually and collectively, they seek to demonstrate to governments (local,
regional, national) and international agencies that urban poor groups are more
capable than they in poverty reduction, and they also provide these agencies
with strong community-based partners through which to do so. They are, or can
be, instruments of deep democracy, rooted in local context and able to mediate
globalizing forces in ways that benefit the poor. In so doing, both within
nations and globally, they are seeking to redefine what governance and
governability mean.
