Progressive Housing project

The Project

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:

1. Social component: Decision-making of home owners
2. Technical compontent: The availability and execution of technical solutions
3. Financial component: Homeowners have the means to afford the solutions
4. Government component: There are regulations in place that support qualitative building across the country for all social segments.

To achieve this, the project will work along the following intervention areas: 

1. Demand generation (addressing the social compontent) 

• sensibilisation
• identifying the social group of early adopers and support them in spreading the word
• establishing market-based solutions such as micro-insurance, which can lead to sustainable change of homeowners' behaviour

2. Supply promotion (addressing the technical component)

• business model development for local SMEs 
• training of master builders
• introducing a standardised approach, diagnosis tool, and impact measurement tool
• fostering further innovative solutions to drive productivity

3. Finance mechanism (addresing the financial and government component)

• saving practices
• credit products
• subsidy programmes

4. Knowledge management 

• capitalising the learnings
• designing a route for replication in other, similar countries
• positioning ViPro in the international housing market
• connecting with research and academia

Project Vision

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.

Project Partners 

• CENAC (Centre for the Study of Construction and Urban and Regional Development)
• Habitat for Humanity and the Terwilliger Centre
• Miyamoto
• UN-Habitat
• TECHO

Financing partners

This project is financed by Hilti Foundation. It is part of the Swisscontact Development Programme, which is co-financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Federal Department of Foreign Affairs FDFA.