Background

Ensuring that the population at the bottom of the pyramid can sustainably benefit from new housing finance products requires technical assistance and capacity building for all the different stakeholders involved. This is key not only to ensure the sustainability of each programme, but also to create fundamental fairness to low income borrowers and communities. The long term success of loan repayment in microfinance housing lending and micro-mortgage lending depends on borrower understanding and acceptance of the terms of borrowing. This is especially important for vulnerable individual borrowers and community group borrowers at the bottom of the pyramid.

Objectives

To increase the ability of the bottom of the pyramid population in the target regions to effectively use housing finance and borrow on fair and affordable terms by gaining access to financial literacy programmes offered by domestic financial institutions.

Activities

• Consumer Focus Groups: to ascertain levels of general financial literacy and conduct an overall needs assessment among current and potential clients of participating institutions.
• Borrower Education Workbook: to develop a set of educational materials that enable a family to adequately understand and assess the different housing finance products. The workbook will be designed to be discussed within the family, and will have a focus on female concerns.
• Capacity Building for Bank Lending Officers: this set of training activities will ensure that loan officers work productively with customers to choose the right housing finance product for their individual situation.  The bank loan officer training component will be based on the Borrower Education Workbook and will be set up to allow further training to further loan officers (training of trainers)
• Monitoring and Evaluation of the use of materials and training provided to financial institutions and the subsequent financial literacy programmes implemented