-
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.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
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.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
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
-
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
-
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.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
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.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- housing
-
The Pyramid Within the Pyramid: Segmenting the BoP Affordable Housing Market
A new arrival to a slum and a rickshaw driver living in a slum both are defined as BoP. But the differences between them are as vast as night and day. How can they all be treated the same when it comes to delivering products and services? Since Ashoka launched the Housing for All initiative in 2008, it’s clear the BoP market is far more complex.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Housing for All Series: Sizing Up the Affordable Housing Deficit
The second article of the month-long series on Housing for All in partnership with Ashoka, examines the magnitude of the challenge, and its implications for higher education and certification for construction trades at all levels and skill fields: including technology, alternative building materials, and better planning/infrastructure needs.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- housing