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Housing Series: Establishing Quality Standards for Affordable Housing
Who enforces building standards? If customers are sold a home with sub-standard construction or materials - or their neighbor builds a dangerously unstable structure - what recourse do BoP citizens have? The certification prices we are developing is not a one-time "stamp of approval." Rather, it starts with pre-building and lasts over time.
- Categories
- Investing
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Housing Series: Sustainable Communities Generating Sustainable Habitats
We began Echale a Tu Casa over 25 years ago as a nonprofit to help low-income Mexican families improve home safety, health and hygiene conditions. Realizing that philanthropy would not permit us to have much of an impact on these living conditions, we created a social enterprise built on an integrated system of savings, credit and subsidies.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care, WASH
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Housing Series: Shelter After Disaster – Temporary Aid Or Pathway to a Better Future?
Over the past years the global humanitarian community has been working to develop solutions that offer disaster and conflict-affected families a more durable shelter than the tents traditionally provided. "Transitional shelter, " guides families on a pathway to durable shelter solutions, a process to choose from multiple options for their future.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- housing
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Housing Series: The Power of Collecting Accurate Data
Many companies applying market surveys for middle/upper income consumers to the BoP market have failed. We employed slum residents and community workers to get honest answers, and to use cell phones and tablets to gather and send data for analysis. The result: specific guidance for architects and developers on target markets and ideal customers.
- Categories
- Technology
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Housing Series: From the Field, Reflections From Two Dow Corning Leaders on Building a BoP Market
Dow Corning’s Citizen Service Corps sends employees around the world to see, hear and think about what new markets need, and come back ready to translate those insights into innovations and new products. The posts below are excerpts from two employees who worked on Housing for All in India as their volunteer experience.
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- Uncategorized
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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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- Uncategorized
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Housing Series: Building a Strong Foundation, When Earthquakes Hurricanes Hit Affordable Housing
"Earthquakes don’t kill people, poorly built buildings do," says Elizabeth Hausler, an engineer who turned her passion and know-how for building into an international non-profit social enterprise. Creating strategies and best practices to build safe and affordable housing became her life’s work and sparked her to found Build Change.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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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.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- housing
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