The Asian Coalition for Community Action Program (ACCA) is a program of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) which supports a process of citywide and community-driven slum upgrad- ing in Asian cities. Urban poor community organizations are the primary doers in planning and implementing projects which tackle problems of land, infrastructure and housing at scale in their cities, in partnership with their local governments and other local stakeholders. The ACCA Program didn't come out of the blue, but builds on the initiatives that have already developed in most countries in the Asia region, by community organizations and their supporting groups, and it draws on their combined experiences, mistakes and learning over the past 25 years. The program is an important tool for making change in situations of poverty a tool which belongs to Asia's urban poor and to all these active groups, and which is helping them to grow and to make change in their cities.

The ACCA Program has now completed its fifth year. The program has supported activities in 215 cities, in 19 countries. This very wide reach in such a short period of time has been a kind of region- wide experiment, and the experiment has proved that urban poor communities and their development partners in all these (and other) cities are ready to address citywide problems and citywide develop ment together. The program has demonstrated a new kind of development intervention, for the more open, democratic world we now live in, in which the poor have the freedom to decide things and manage their own development. In this model, instead of being seen as the problem or the passive recipients of somebody else's idea of what they need, the poor themselves become the doers and the deliverers of solutions to the huge problems of usban poverty, land and housing in Asian cities

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