Somsook Boonyabancha
Board of trustees
Somsook Boonyabancha is secretary-general of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, a coalition of organisations working on urban poor housing development in Asia. She was previously the director of Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) in Thailand. She was born in 1951 in Thailand and graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and from the Housing and Urbanization Course in Copenhagen, Denmark during 1977-1978.
She has been working extensively on urban poor housing development and slum upgrading in Thailand and other Asia countries for the past 30 years. Her particular expertise is in orienting the development of community driven, community-led development to improve urban community housing, community welfare and rural community land and housing development. During her years at CODI, she carried out a national city-wide community upgrading process – this process has now been replicated in cities across Thailand. Apart from her involvement with the urban community, she has extensive experience in community-led development processes on various rural development activities, linking rural and urban areas, and community-led disaster rehabilitation.
Currently, she is working on the Asian Centre for Human Right's new regional programme on the Asian Coalition for Community Action, which supports city-wide community-led upgrading and development in Asian cities. The programme is bringing about city-wide development changes in 200 Asian cities in 15 countries.
Somsook Boonyabancha's blog posts
The floods this year in Thailand have been unprecedented. Floods have now entered parts of Bangkok, the country's capital city, and the fate of the rest of the city hangs in the balance. An extraordinary volume of water – more than 10,000 million cubic metres – somehow needs to get from Thailand's central plains to the sea, with Bangkok standing in the way.
When a large disaster hits – like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami – it receives international media coverage, aid is mobilised and aid agencies rush to respond. While survivors of smaller disasters might wish for such attention, there are some serious negative side-effects to these responses. Survivors are often sidelined with little influence on the responses chosen and with little control over how the external funding is used or prioritised, as these decisions rest mostly with external funders. But responses that don’t consult with them risk not only failing, but potentially weakening the communities they’re working with. It doesn’t have to be this way.