Contexte
Since 2010, the Fondation pour le Logement des Défavorisés (FPL) and CRAterre have been working in partnership to help the most disadvantaged people gain access to decent housing. In June 2023, the FPL renewed its trust in CRAterre for a further three years. This gave rise to the ‘Networking to promote access to decent housing’ project, the aim of which is to support FPL's international partners in developing methods and tools to improve the response to people's access to decent housing.
The aim of this project is to support FPL's international partners in the development of methods and tools to improve people's access to decent housing. The project has 2 main focuses.
The first involves providing CRAterre's expertise to FPL's partner organisations that express a need for it.
The second involves coordinating the network of FPL partners in order to co-develop methods and tools relating to housing, associated with the themes of respect for production methods, gender and climate change.
Objectives
The three-year project proposed as part of this professional placement, led by Habitat-Cité and FUNDASAL, with technical support from CRAterre and financial backing from the Fondation pour le Logement (FPL), aims to contribute to the fight against poverty and gender inequality by improving the housing and living conditions of families in precarious situations in three neighbourhoods in El Salvador. Its aim is to support groups of residents in improving and building their homes, to strengthen the organisation of community groups and the social fabric with a view to moving towards self-management, and to incorporate an approach that takes into account gender inequalities and violence against women and children.
The project is structured into three successive three-year phases; at that time, the project was in the third year of its second three-year phase. It focuses on three localities: Villa Venecia in the municipality of Soyapango, department of San Salvador; Cuna de la Paz in the municipality of La Palma, department of Chalatenango; and Bendición de Dios in the municipality of Ilopango, department of San Salvador.
This mission forms part of the third year of the project ‘Collective Social Housing Production in El Salvador’ and is part of an effort to capitalise on and promote the experiences developed since 2019 in three working-class communities in the country: Villa Venecia, Cuna de la Paz and Bendición de Dios. The focus will be primarily on the cooperatives in Cuna de la Paz, given the maturity of the processes being implemented there, and to a lesser extent on Bendición de Dios, due to the stage of progress in that community, where construction work has not yet begun.
The main objective of the placement is to contribute to the consolidation of the initiatives funded by the FLD during the first two three-year phases of the project, in addition to the impact assessment that will be carried out in parallel. This consolidation should make it possible to document the lessons learnt, innovations and challenges encountered both in the processes of building or improving housing and in social, organisational and participatory initiatives, as well as those aimed at combating gender inequalities.
Results
The two-month mission enabled us to carry out support activities for the social and technical processes associated with cooperative housing projects, as well as to observe and systematise participatory methodologies. The following activities were carried out:
- Activities as part of the PROSOC project
- Workshops with the FUNDASAL team
- Site visits and semi-structured interviews
- Collection of audiovisual testimonies for FLD
- Workshops on gender, children and interviewing
- Activities carried out in collaboration with the evaluation team
- Support during technical surveys
- Workshops on gender and children
- Activities carried out with FUNDASAL and other partners (SEEDS)
- Visit to the green roof project: San Luis la Herradura and Tacachico
Partners
UrbaSEN, Grdr, Padem, Lumanti, CADECOM, CARD*
FUNDASA, Habitat-Cité
