The Progressive Housing project is a response to the rapid urbanisation in peripheral areas, usually through informal processes. In many cases, urbanisation leads to poor construction due to a lack of professional advice, the use of poorly trained workers and low-quality materials, uninformed owners, and informal land tenure, among other factors.
Despite these issues, progressive construction is the most widely used way for families in Peru to adapt their housing conditions to the changing characteristics of their homes.
A holistic view is crucial to find solutions and ways to improve the functioning of the system that involves some 120 million people living in informal settlements. The Progressive Housing project aims to improve the supply of and access to appropriate services, products and technologies that enable the improvement of progressive construction. Through the inception phase (January 2023-May 2024), four components were identified that need to be in place for real breakthrough on a systemic and sustainable level:
To achieve this, the project will work along the following intervention areas:
1. Demand generation (addressing the social compontent)
2. Supply promotion (addressing the technical component)
3. Finance mechanism (addresing the financial and government component)
4. Knowledge management
The vision of change is that homeowners of progressive housing make better decisions that allow them to live in safer (and healthier) houses. This will be possible by introducing structural improvements that reduce risk of injury or death in the event of a seismis disaster. With this, they will also avoid the loss of their homes and the family investment of a lifetime. To get there, we want to see a vibrant market of construction solutions offering families practical measures to reinforce and improve their housing and financial mechanisms to faciliate homeowners' access and choose those solutions.
If the intervention is successful, an international replication of the programme is planned in Colombia, where the modularity of the model can be tested. This means that the different parts of the model are exchangeable. For example, the technical components, which then just need to be adapted to the local needs in terms of structural problems and natural risks.
Key objectives
The main phase of the project is planned for 4 years with the key objective to design a modular tool addressing all four components of a housing problem and achieve proof of concept in 6490 homes at the benefit of over 25000 people by the end of the project phase in 2028.
Ce projet est financé par Hilti Foundation. Il fait partie du programme de développement de Swisscontact, cofinancé par la Direction du développement et de la coopération Suisse (DDC), Département fédéral des affaires étrangères DFAE.