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Getting to Scale in Housing Microfinance: A Study of ACCION Partners in Latin America
English
(108 KB PDF)
Español
(113 KB PDF)
A vast unmet demand
exists for housing finance for low-income
populations in the developing world. Though
solutions have yet to reach significant scale,
either from governmental or the private sector, the
microfinance industry has recently made great
strides in this area. Housing microfinance has shown
signs of potential to reach scale.
Seeking to better
understand the potential for scale in housing
microfinance, ACCION International and Habitat for
Humanity International joined efforts to conduct a
study in conjunction with Cities Alliance financial
support. This study covered ten of ACCION’s partners
in Latin America, representing more than 90 percent
of the ACCION Network’s housing portfolio. The
objective of this research was to understand the key
success factors as well as challenges and barriers
for reaching scale in housing.
A Comparison of Housing Finance Programs for Low
Income People in Peru
English
(113 KB PDF)
Until recently, access
to housing-related finance has remained extremely
limited in the developing world for low income
people. Commercial banks, unable to access secondary
mortgage markets, typically extend mortgages or
other types of housing loans only to middle or upper
income clients. Some governments have initiated
large-scale housing subsidy programs targeting the
poor; however, these initiatives have often fallen
far short of their objectives. In some countries
housing finance offered by microfinance
institutions, a private solution, shows promise of
reaching more people sustainably.
This paper addresses
the attempts of one country, Peru, and the various
actors in the housing finance arena there, to
improve access to housing finance at the bottom of
the pyramid. It focuses on a comparison of three
approaches to low income housing finance: the
Mivivienda and Techo Proprio programs of the
Government of Peru and the Micasa loan product of
microfinance institution Mibanco.
Access to credit for
the poor is a global policy challenge, which has a
direct impact on incremental shelter delivery as
well as local economic development. Innovations in
providing sustainable financial and other services
to poor people for shelter are emerging from
different quarters, particularly in micro-finance.
Several organisations have focused on gaining tenure
and property rights for the poor and are also
innovating with financial services for communities.
To date, many of these experiences have not been
documented, or at least analysed according to a
common framework. Many commercial financial
institutions, including those that started as
micro-finance institutions (MFIs), are interested in
learning from other experiences in order to improve
their own product offerings to poor clientele.
Governments and their funding partners are also
interested in learning from successful and efficient
housing finance schemes to improve their own models
of support.
The Cities Alliance launched a primary analysis
on this topic, initially through assessing
innovations from field programmes. The Alliance partnered with Accion
International, the Cooperative Housing Foundation
and Frontier Finance, each of which is a network of
financial institutions with a long history of
commitment to and experience and success in
delivering sustainable financial services to the
poor. The initiative was intended as a learning exercise, with
the different institutions working together to learn
from each other's models and experiences and
applying these lessons throughout their networks.
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