Baan Mankong — Thailand's Community-Driven Secure Housing Programme

Launched in 2003 by Thailand's Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), Baan Mankong ("secure housing") channels government infrastructure subsidies and soft housing loans directly to community savings cooperatives rather than to contractors or local authorities.

Residents of informal settlements organise into savings groups, survey their own communities, and negotiate land tenure arrangements with landowners — public or private — before designing and building upgraded housing and infrastructure themselves.

Between 2003 and 2011 the programme reached more than 90,000 households across 1,546 communities, at an average cost of roughly US$570 per family. More than 60% of participating households were able to negotiate arrangements that let them remain on or near their original site; of these, 43% secured long-term leases and 35% achieved cooperative land ownership with title, typically subject to a 15-year minimum holding period before individual titling options opened up.

The model has been credited internationally as a rare example of slum upgrading that treats residents as co-financiers and co-designers rather than beneficiaries, and it has been studied academically for its effects on tenure security and community cohesion. Independent commentators note that outcomes vary significantly by community — land negotiations "can be difficult" and results depend heavily on local landowner cooperation — and that even after nearly a decade the programme had reached under a third of Thailand's estimated 300,000 informal-settlement households, underlining the limits of scaling a negotiation-intensive model.