Affordable housing in Africa - seeking collaborators

There is a backlog of 65 million houses in Africa - requiring an estimated $10 trillion of investment capital. I am seeking collaborators to liberate this capital.

During 2019/2020 we successfully proved the concept of enabling micro property development, providing returns for investors, creating wealth for financially-excluded urban land owners and significantly improving living conditions.

The challenge is to establish how Cardano could begin to meet this massive humanitarian and environmental need (and demand), because housing in Africa is not attractive to traditional capital markets. I am new to the Cardano ecosystem, very excited by the shared mission and seeking to connect with anyone interested in collaborating on creating a solution to this challenge.

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This sounds like a really interesting idea and i will follow that thread closely.

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Thanks.

It is a fascinating topic - and I am hoping - a perfect fit for Cardano.

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How were you able to prove the concept in 2019/2020?

We built 32 rental units utilising traditional building methodologies. We proved the market demand from land owners and tenants and proved the financial model. The objective now is:

  1. To open up this market for the 60% of property owners who do not have title and therefore no access to financial services. 2. To build utilising Modern Methods of Construction to ensure that by solving one problem we do not create a new environmental one.
  2. To find alternative sources and methods of funding.
  3. To create a rewards ecosystem, particularly for the tenants so that good payment behaviour is rewarded and to develop a way to enable them to get onto the wealth creation ladder.

1 and 2 are done by new and circular building technologies. 3 and 4 are why I am on this forum - seeking the knowledge and skills to work out to integrate the real and virtual worlds to achieve these objectives.

Ambitious - but achievable!

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So you’d essentially like to set up or use a Cardano based credit history system for the tenants? Sounds really cool. I don’t know much about crypto or Cardano as a project, but it seems like a native coin could be minted on Cardano to allocate tokens based on timely payments made, and if a certain amount of those coins were burned over time, it would amount to a kind of credit scoring system. Say each tenant was allotted 700 coins in an account with mobile access (the number is arbitrary except that it is equivalent to a “good” credit score in the U.S./FICO system), and they were allotted, say, 5 tokens per month for making their payment timely, but have 2 tokens burned automatically each month, and a given number more tokens burned for being late on their payment a given number of days. If you could do this, and get local merchants or other service providers to give unsecured or partially secured loans to individuals with say, 720 tokens, and taking on credit and paying it back timely yielded further token rewards that were incorporated into the system, I feel like that could work. And the system could maybe also burn tokens at a slightly higher rate as a participant’s score went up, causing them to reach an upper end equilibrium as they build their creditworthiness. Given Cardano’s stated mission, I’d be surprised if there weren’t developers working on solutions like this, or at least considering them.

What country are you working in? My work is in real estate and mortgages, which is partly why I was interested in your post. But my partner and I would definitely like to visit some places in Africa someday, and maybe even live there.

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Gremlin,
Are you familiar with RealT, Sun Exchange, and Power Ledger?

I am interested in collaborating on smart contracts/ duplicatable/ open source templates

  1. for Crowdfunding sustainable community oriented projects on the blockchain (decentralized)
    *Entry level to contribute is affordable for everyone
    *“Everyone” becomes the bank and receives a decent return on their contribution no matter how tiny it is.
    *No massive hoops to apply or
    *No funding cancelled if target not met (plan adjusts to meet income/fund)…funding based on different levels…excess for one project shared to the next sustainable, community oriented, environmentally aware startup
  2. Some sort of sustainable affiliate program that
    Helps everyone create their own business/income WITHOUT being scummy/pushy/in it for the money/gold watch/gag me with a spoon opulent/excessive wealth…sorry…I think you get my point on this point
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I like the idea also I had something like that in mind I want to learn to develop on cardano. I’ll follow the link closely. I have a grand mission of supplying affordable housing around the world.

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Yes - a credit and a reward system. For example, if one makes a provision for bad debt, the incentive is not to use it as the benefit could be pooled, shared and distributed to the longest and best payers? Almost like a group savings where tenants are incentivised from a reputation and value perspective to pay their rent timeously. Anyone working on anything like this - or wanting to??

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I am working in Mozambique and South Africa.

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I am aware. To date, the challenge in solving this in the affordable housing space has been title. In the developing world, land ownership can be challenging to prove which prevents investment. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t potential - just that traditional financial institutions cannot do it based on current models and have no desire to do it because it is “not their market”. I know that we can do it - but it requires innovation and a community orientation!

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Here’s a credit scoring system being proposed on Catalyst - to be implemented around lending on the Cardano blockchain. I imagine tech like this might be modified by the right developers to different purposes: https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Cardano-Algorithmic-Credit-Scoring/334490-48088

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Sounds like we have come to the right place.

Most certainly out-of-the-box thinking with one goal being housing and another wealth distribution to community. Hmmm, I am feeling disruptive.

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The group savings idea is one I would like to work on. To incentivize people to store value in at a guaranteed interest rate. Something like Maker- Dia.

Something like that. Not clear yet on what or how in the tech space. Need ideas, skills and energy. Know how to do it in the “physical world”.

Lot’s of work to do and lots to learn but a very exciting and hugely beneficial project.

I think the first step is to create (or contribute to) an identity validation system on the Cardano blockchain (or on a blockchain which can be referenced by it) that allows for various levels of identity verification and trust but which doesn’t expose any aspect of privacy without explicit, per-instance consent. There would also be a need for users to establish consensus between themselves and possibly to also form trust networks (ie such as between members within a neighborhood or village), and also without exposing the privacy of the identities in that network. I think there are lots of identity validation projects on various block chains, so there are probably plenty of subject matter experts and white papers on this topic.
Second, I think there would be a need to define assets to be owned. For land and the buildings contained on them, perhaps a GIS system combining GPS, photos, and scans of any existing documentation, legal documents, descriptions, landmark references, or agreements could establish definitions of property. There might be some variations between countries or villages as far as what are legally allowable definitions of property which may need conforming to based on location.
Then I think there would also need to be an arbitration process where either through consensus or decisioning offered by government entities that disputes over property could be settled and recorded. There may be a need for this system to also register liens related to financing, but if some alternative could be used that would be preferable. Avoiding repossessions and housing crises would be ideal in developing areas, especially as a way to avoid predatory lending practices.
Another aspect to solve would be how to import various forms of pre-existing ownership registrations. One difficult problem to solve would be when there’s disagreements around the political entity that is in charge of the containing land area, or when people are displaced by war or changes in government.
Lastly for this entity defining component, there would be a need to include for conditions like co-ownership, tenancy, inheritance, etc.
Besides this component there would need to be the financing aspect which would ideally operate as independently of the entity validating process as possible.
The mechanisms involved with lending could be really long conversation and there are many facets to it. There are a lot of projects and thought which have explored this area in depth, though most involve staking currency assets as collateral (which would be easier to deal with than trying to stake physical property as collateral). But the first step I think is establishing the definitions of individuals and property.
One last thought is that ideally the system could be flexible enough to handle lending for other types of purchases as well such as livestock or equipment to facilitate running a business, etc. If the lending was simply done as currency borrowed against staked collateral as most defi lending currently works, then what funds are used for wouldn’t matter. But I think a lot of detailed discussion around the lending aspects starts to get off topic. Like you said, the main hurdle is defining ownership, so treating that as the main focus and keeping that as a separate endeavor from any financing aspects is probably the best approach.

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Great to see you’re making big progress on this project. Just saw this interview and was reminded of our correspondence last year: Creating #RealFi Impact by Providing Affordable Sustainable Homes - YouTube