New Ebook: The Case for a Trillion Dollar BoP Housing Market

Several months ago, NextBillion teamed up with one of our Content Partners, Ashoka Full Economic Citizenship, for a Twitter chat. Our mission: Source the most innovative and successful thought leaders and practitioners addressing the multiple challenges and market solutions to affordable housing and post their examples and ideas on our site to share with hundreds of thousands of our readers globally.

The discussion was lively, and ideas tumbled out even faster than your typical Twitter chat. It’s hard to find a topic with more complexities and more relevance to the poverty alleviation puzzle than affordable housing. From financing to land rights, from market incentives to build  new homes to rehabilitation of self-built dilapidated dwellings, from new eco-friendly building materials to new social-business models that ensure sustainable and profitable development , affordable housing is a complex ecosystem with all its intricacies.

As Rochelle Beck, communications director at Ashoka’s Full Economic Citizenship noted, the affordable housing gap is wide and growing wider. More than 1.6 billion people, or one-seventh of the world’s population, now lives in slums. By 2030, the UN projects this number will triple. This means globally each day, 200,000 people leave the land and move to cities; from now on, the world will need to build the equivalent of a million-person city every week just to keep up.

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Scott Anderson is the managing editor of NextBillion.net, a web community focused on poverty alleviation through market-based enterprise. He is based at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan. Follow him on Twitter @ScotterAnderson