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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.
Full biography

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 picture

Somsook Boonyabancha's blog posts

The 2011 monsoon season brought unusually heavy rains and severe floods to many south-east Asian countries. Thailand was worst affected, with large parts of the Thai capital Bangkok under water (Photo: Chrisgel Ryan Cruz, Creative Commons via Flickr)

Thailand's floods: complex political and geographical factors behind the crisis

Blog, Nov 2011

Why survivors should lead responses to disasters

Blog, Oct 2011
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50 years linking local to global

Find out more about IIED’s plans in our 50th birthday year: our achievements and what comes next…

IIED's mission is to build a fairer, more sustainable world, using evidence, action and influence in partnership with others. We link local priorities and global challenges, and our 2019-2024 strategy details how we will Make Change Happen

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