Livelihoods and community-led housing

This project examines ways to measure the livelihoods impact of the CLIFF programme through a pilot project with NACHU, Nairobi.

CLIFF, the Community-Led Infrastructure Funding Facility, is an established programme providing bridging loans to slum dwellers and communities of the urban poor to build affordable housing and infrastructure. It was set up in 2002, to enable low-income communities to develop affordable and accessible shelter and infrastructure. It is operated by the NGO Reall (formerly Homeless International), which works with partners across three continents to pioneer the creation of viable housing markets at the bottom of the pyramid.

Shelter and employment are inextricably intertwined for the urban poor, particularly in the global South. While links between provision of shelter and direct employment (on-site construction and production) and indirect employment (supply-chain effects, post-construction effects from stable housing provision) are established, currently there are no robust methods for measuring the direct and indirect employment and livelihood benefits of affordable housing for the urban poor. Working in partnership with NACHU, the National Housing Cooperative Union of Kenya, this research project will develop and piloting a method to capture and locally contextualise the direct and indirect employment generated by shelter and infrastructure projects with communities of the urban poor.

Funder

Reall: Real Equity for All

People

• Dr Tom Smith, Cardiff University
• Professor Alison Brown, Cardiff University
• Staff at NACHU (National Housing Cooperative Union of Kenya)