Understanding Pro Poor Housing Finance In Malawi

Developing regions are set to account for the vast majority of future urban growth, and women and girls will become the majority inhabitants of these locations in the Global South. This is one of the first books to detail the challenges facing poorer segments of the female population who commonly reside in ‘slums’. It explores the variegated disadvantages of urban poverty and slum-dwelling from a gender perspective. This book revolves around conceptualisation of the ‘gender-urban-slum interface’ which explains key elements to understanding women’s experiences in slum environments. It has a specific focus on the ways in which gender inequalities are can be entrenched but also alleviated. Included is a review of the demographic factors which are increasingly making cities everywhere ‘feminised spaces’, such as increased rural-urban migration among women, demographic ageing, and rising proportions of female-headed households in urban areas. Discussions focus in particular on education, paid and unpaid work, access to land, property and urban services, violence, intra-urban mobility, and political participation and representation. This book will be of use to researchers and professionals concerned with gender and development, urbanisation and rural-urban migration.

This book explores the linkages between formal and informal housing finance drawing upon the lessons of NGO and micro-finance practices. Both public and private formal finance institutions have experienced great difficulty in lending below a middle-income client group, and are often reluctant to lend for the purpose of housing at all. This failure of formal finance to filter down to low-income households, and in particular to women, has led various NGOs and community groups to create and adopt innovative finance programmes, such as informal savings banks and credit rotating schemes. The authors critically assess the impact of theses schemes, and evaluate links between gender, housing and finance.

PUBLISHING NOVEMBER 2020 How do low-income families, representing some 70% of the world's population, finance home building and improvements - and how is the financial sector, from microfinance institutions and banks to investors and regulators, changing to serve their needs? The practice of housing microfinance has evolved substantially, with a large number of innovations across the entire housing financing ecosystem. New research methodologies, such as financial diaries, have yielded a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how poor households use finance, both formal and informal, to construct their homes. The housing finance industry is also growing. The home improvement loans that are at the heart of housing microfinance are offered in hundreds of institutions, leading to important lessons on how they work. Meanwhile, a new class of institutions - micro-mortgage lenders - have emerged to fill the space between housing microfinance and traditional mortgage lending. On the funding side, debt funding is now available to finance or re-finance housing microfinance loans; while other investors have carved out a new role for equity investing in housing finance - showing the critical role that private investors can play. And now a new breed of public wholesale financing has emerged, showing the catalytic role public sector investment can play in encouraging housing finance markets in their countries. This volume explores recent innovations in housing microfinance, presented by the innovators themselves: from field researchers and financial providers, to investors and regulators. It is a key reference to any reader interested in expanding housing finance for the world's poor.

This book brings together a broad range of research that interrogates how real estate market analysis, finance, planning, and investment for residential and commercial developments across the African continent are undertaken. In the past two decades, African real estate markets have rapidly matured, creating the conditions for new investment opportunities which has increased the demand for a deeper understanding of the commercial and residential markets across the continent. The chapters consider issues that pertain to formal real estate markets and the critical relationship between formal and informal property markets on the continent. With contributing authors from South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, the book considers the achievements of African real estate markets while also highlighting the complex central themes such as underdeveloped land tenure arrangements, the availability of finance in both the commercial and residential sectors, rapidly growing urban areas, and inadequate professional skills. This book is essential reading for students in real estate, land management, planning, finance, development, and economics programs who need to understand the nuances of markets in the African context. Investors and policy makers will learn a lot reading this book too.