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Housing Series: Why Dow Corning Sends Employees to Serve BoP Projects around the World
What would happen if major global companies sent their employees to work with people in emerging economies for weeks at a time to get to know their cultures, needs and daily patterns of life? Not as "poverty tourism," but rather part of a strategy to see all that is happening and and then to think how that translates to product innovations.
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From the Roundtable: Reflections on Improving Microfinance
Citi Foundation recently hosted an interesting day-long roundtable that focused on the Center for Financial Inclusion’s (CFI) report on "Opportunities and Obstacles to Financial Inclusion." It’s an important report because it raises significant issues for the sector. The discussion focused on how to protect and educate legitimate borrowers.
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Housing Series: Strategies to Add Quality and Value to Incremental Home Improvement
Various stakeholders are working together with BoP communities to innovate new, inclusive and market-driven strategies to raise quality, lower costs and add technical assistance - assistance that leaves citizens not only with a sturdier roof overhead, but with increased confidence, skills and a good credit track record to build on for the future.
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Affordable Housing for All Series: In the Race for Affordable Housing, Who Has the Head Start?
In the race for affordable housing for all, is there a clear leader? Is government the biggest player in BoP affordable housing? Are NGOs? Private construction firms? The answer might surprise you. Far ahead of the pack in resources mobilized, progress made and sheer numbers of BoP housing solutions implemented, are the BoP households themselves.
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Affordable Housing Series: The Rights to the Land Under Your Home
The migration of millions from rural areas as a result of global urbanization has created informal, and often chaotic, growth. Social business Terra Nova, based in the southern Brazilian state of Paran?, marks a new, unprecedented initiative to solve the lack of land ownership in favelas and to bring "squatter" communities into the formal economy.
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In Guatemala, Alterna Aims to Harness Entrepreneurial Spirit
According to the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, Guatemala has the second highest rate of entrepreneurship worldwide. Since most enterprises develop out of necessity, there is a large gap in training and technical assistance. Launched in 2010, Alterna, an incubator and mentor to social and environmental ventures, aims to fill that gap.
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ViewChange Film Friday: ’With My Own Two Wheels’
For most Americans, the bicycle is a choice. It is a toy, a recreational tool, or an eco-conscious form of transportation. In 2010, 3 mountain biking buddies from Santa Barbara set off on a round-the-world journey to film the stories of individuals for whom the bicycle is not a choice, but a machine that opens new economic opportunity and purpose.
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Beyond Four Walls
A house is more than a roof overhead - it gives a sense of security, empowerment, and hope. This is a core belief that drives Ashoka’s Housing for All (HFA) program - along with the principle that the affordable housing market is ripe for market-based solutions. I learned this at the start of my summer internship with HFA’s India team this year.
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