November 18th, 2009 Posted in Regional, Blogs in English, Blogs en Español, Brasil | No Comments »
Português
The Bento Rubião Foundation, an Oxfam GB partner in Brazil, has had its Land and Housing Programme awarded by Habitat, the UN agency whose mission is to promote better housing and cities for all. The announcement was made on October 5th, World Habitat Day.
The Foundation’s Programme was chosen the best practice among 16 finalists selected from a pool of nearly 100 candidates. It received the Shaikh Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa United Nations Habitat Awards, given for the second time and sponsored by the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Middle Eastern island country. The judging panel highlighted “the consistent and persistent ways in which the Programme advocates for human rights and the right to housing for all, specially the urban poor.”
The award ceremony will take place in March 2010 during the World Urban Forum, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, hometown of the Bento Rubião Foundation.
The Awardee. Founded in 1986, the Bento Rubião Center for Human Rights Defence Foundation works with the urban poor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its foci are the impacts of social exclusion and housing rights violations and the conditions of children and youth. Its main goal is to strengthen the legal and social tools that can make the urban poor the leaders of their own struggles for rights.
The Land and Housing Programme. The Awarded Programme works with people at risk of being evicted and seeks to enforce their rights to decent housing and urbanized land. It is organized in four areas:
I. Support to Housing Social Production: social, legal, administrative and technical (engineering, architecture and urbanism) advisory to self-help housing associations and cooperatives. It builds capacity among communities to work in the whole social housing production chain (land allocation, funding, project design, construction, and the post move-in adaptation). It applies participatory methods and has supported the building and reform of 1.641 units. 1.000 more have just entered into construction phase.
II. Social-Legal Aid Services to people at risk of being evicted: its goal is to cease threats of land eviction by pursuing land regularization and land development. Since the Programme’s inception, 14.343 families have been benefited by legal injunctions and 30.000 have lawsuits pending decision.
III. Policy making, advocacy and monitoring: pro-poor housing policies are promoted in networks, public councils, civil society fora, and so on.
IV. Capacity building: seminars, workshops and publications are frequently disseminating information, knowledge and good practices on right to housing and right to the city.
In the past three years, the Foundation has worked directly with more than 8.000 families. Its work has also benefited the urban poor living in the outskirts of several large cities in Brazil, as well as their grassroots, through information sharing.
Bento Rubião Foundation works in partnership with a variety of public, private and civil society organizations, from grassroots to social movements; community leaders; judicial and court officers; federal, state and local policymakers; press; and international organizations working on housing and the social production of urban settlements.
Oxfam GB’s support to the Programme. According to architect Ricardo Gouveia, Bento Rubião’s Coordinator, Oxfam’s overall support to the Programme has had a structuring role, contributing to its unit and integration, and has allowed for the development of key learning and advocacy initiatives. “Without Oxfam’s support, there would be a real risk of fragmentation,” he adds, “and the Programme could have become just projects piled up together, and that would have made it difficult to have reached the results that this award acknowledges.”
Monica Oliveira / Athayde Motta
Oxfam GB - Escritório Recife/Oxfam GB’s Brazil Office at Recife
