Development Ratings

Homeless International’s main measures of success are the number of people secured land tenure and improved accommodation, and the number of public toilets built. Overall results achieved for slum dwellers to March 2008 are: secure tenure achieved for 30,000 people, decent housing for 27,000, and safe water and sanitation for 410,000 people. Examples include in Zimbabwe where 45,000 poor households are being supported to improve their housing and living conditions. In Ghana, 8,000 households are members of community savings groups.

After discussions with HI’s Indian CLIFF partner, the national, state and Mumbai city governments are planning large scale provision of small houses to meet the needs for low-income housing. Different types of housing units are being analysed. City-wide slum upgrading is being explored for 5 to 10 cities. The success of the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ has focussed attention on the state of Indian slums. The 2008 riots in Kenya caused some destruction of local housing, but saw subsequent renewed interest in housing loans. Importantly, the bank agreed that the CLIFF savings scheme organisation could appraise new loan requests. A memorandum of understanding has been signed to regularise slums on public land in Nairobi, and a community-managed model for water services is being developed. Water connections are planned for 20,000 people by the end of 2008. In the first Philippines CLIFF project, 20 families have been housed in demonstration houses. Low cost housing prototypes are being used that are affordable but still good quality. The Philippines Alliance is setting up an intermediary finance institution. 100 new houses are being rolled out.

The relatively low average cost of improving the quality of housing for each person reflects the size of families (5-6 people per family), as well as the additional contributions from other international funding partners, the local authorities influenced to contribute financially, and local private and third sector sources of funds. For the overall cost per person with improved conditions, the higher value infrastructure costs are balanced by the lower cost processes of supporting community federations to influence local authorities to supply, for instance, water to donated land, low cost sanitation systems, or formalising land use into title deeds. These are all methods of improving the basic quality and decency of housing assets.

A further measure of success is considered to be whether federations of local people are able to help establish other federations and offer their services and experience, extending the impact that HI can achieve. HI is working with its international partners on establishing ways of clearly measuring this type of indicator.