Somsook Boonyabancha

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.