Building Home with Home Improvement Loans

Geeta lives in a one room house in Savda Gevra, a resettlement colony in Delhi, with her husband Vinod and four children. Her family was resettled from a makeshift hut in 2006. Geeta completed her masonry training from the Karmika School for Construction Workers that MHT had opened in Savda Gevra. 

Gita's family lived in a kutcha house, unable to afford the cost to rebuild it

When Geeta and her family moved to Savda, they used what little savings they had to construct a small kutcha house. They had a blue plastic tarp for roof. During the monsoon rains, Geetaben and her four children would huddle together trying to stay dry. Without a roof or any proper walls, her children were constantly falling sick. Like most houses in Savda, they had no water connection at house. Geetaben would wake up early every morning to lug heavy buckets of water from an erratic water tank. With no sewage lines built, Geetaben's family was forced to defecate in the open. They worried about the lack of privacy, potential night attackers and the dismal state of hygiene. After nearly five years, Geetaben and her husband decided to take a Rs 10,000 loan from MHT to construct an underground water pump beneath their house. It changed their lives.

Geeta no longer worries about water shortages or carries heavy buckets of water from the water tank. She feels better about the water quality and her children's improved health. Not wanting debt on their record and eager to apply for a housing improvement loan, the family repaid their loan in less than a year. In May 2012, after becoming a member of SMBT Geetaben applied for a Rs 60,000 home improvement loan from MHT to build a proper roof, a terrace and stairs leading to the first floor. MHT assessed Geeta's repayment capacity by evaluating her household income, assets, savings history, property papers, liens on property and borrowing track record. In addition, engineers from Awaas SEWA provided a cost estimate for Geeta's desired construction. Confident of their repayment capacity, MHT granted Geeta's family a Rs 60,000 housing improvement loan in June 2012. Trained as masons from the Karmika School for Construction Workers that is run by MHT in Savda, Geeta and her husband were able to construct the house themselves in one month without hiring any external laborers. Awaas SEWA engineers also helped Geeta and Vinod in their construction process by assisting with the design and negotiating the cost of materials with vendors. MHT disbursed the Rs 60,000 loan in phases according to the pace of construction, Awaas SEWA was responsible for monitoring the construction quality and pace and for signaling to MHT that the next loan installment should be disbursed.

Vinod works in a tube light factory and Geeta works as a mason. Their household income fluctuates between Rs 8,500 to Rs 10,000 a month. While a quarter of their income goes towards household expenses, they made sure to save around Rs 2,000 a month and pay back the loan. An MHT nameplate that read "This house is funded through a home improvement loan given by the Mahila Housing SEWA Trust" hanged on the front of Geeta's house until she repaid her loan.

Urban Poor Learning about Climate Change by Playing Snakes and Ladders

How many of us grew up playing the Snakes and Ladders game as kids?

The gathering of family around the colorful board, the rush of joy we got when climbing a ladder, and the disappointment when we got bitten by a snake, are memories that we always cherish.

Today, this age-old game is being used by Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) - an NGO that aims to improve the habitat conditions of poor women in the informal sector - to impart messages on climate change, its adverse effects, and building climate resilience.

Lakshmi hails from a slum settlement in Bhopal called Garib Nagar. A community of 400 households, the area is severely affected by water-logging and vector-borne diseases during monsoons and water scarcity during summers. Uneducated and poor, Lakshmi was oblivious to the concept of climate change, although her community has been suffering through increasingly hot summers and heavy monsoons for years. Even after she was introduced to climate change through the community-level meetings, Lakshmi failed to link it to the water scarcity or frequent diseases that her community had to deal with. It was then that MHT introduced the Snakes and Ladders game.

On the 10x10 gridded board, the snakes represented consequences of climate change such as high temperatures and reduction in ground water levels that lead to illnesses and water scarcity. And the ladders represented ways to improve their lives by making thoughtful decisions on saving and investing money on availing themselves of water supplies and education. Lakshmi thoroughly enjoyed the game. In addition to that, she also learnt about the importance of saving money, making careful decisions and thinking ahead about the future of her family. Today she understands that, “saving money is important to move forward as the change in climate and unhygienic living conditions can cause life-threatening issues. I also focus on hygiene now and regularly uses water purification tablets to cleanse drinking water.”

Urban slum settlements like Lakshmi’s are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. However, the people remain completely unaware of the reasons behind the adversities they face and how they can address them. MHT uses simplified communication methods such as games, demonstrations, one-on-one meetings, videos, wall paintings and street plays to generate an interest in people and introduce the concept of climate change, its impacts and build climate resilience.

Introduced in 2016, the Snakes and Ladders game is played during training sessions and community level meetings in 105 slum settlements in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Through the game, around 3,500 women, who otherwise would not have had any knowledge about climate change or its impacts on their day to day lives, have come to understand the true reason behind unbearable summers and monsoons, and appreciate long-term planning, and focus on healthy living.

Another community member, Babitha, has also played Snakes and Ladders multiple times. She acknowledges that in addition to keeping her entertained during her free hours, the game has also improved her understanding about her own living conditions.

She said: “I have learnt that unpurified water can cause diseases, so we have to boil it before consuming to avoid illnesses. I also learnt how plants can help deal with the rise in temperature. I share everything I learn from the meetings with my husband, and have started planting trees in our yard.”

Introducing "vulnerability" to vulnerable people

“We need a cemetery,” came the united voice of residents of Nayi ki Thari, a slum in India’s city of Jaipur, when they were questioned about their top priority needs in meeting climate threats.

The message came as a shock for me, an environment practitioner working on climate change and seeking to extract information on how communities were coping with negative changes in the climate.

While climate change and its associated problems are gaining wider attention globally, the concept of vulnerability remains alien to those most at risk: the communities themselves. The most critical challenge is to transfer the science of climate vagaries to those whose resilience is at risk, particularly with limited access to climate information and information about potential risks.

What the community in Jaipur perceived to be the greatest climate challenge was not the recent floods in the area – the result of increasingly unpredictable rainfall – but the difficulties in carrying dead bodies to a cremation ground located 15 kilometers away, along unpaved and uneven roads that are ever worse when water-logged.

A large drain situated in the marshy soil of the slum often backed up and flooded, submerging the entire locality. Shockingly, children were even drowned during the last monsoon.

A number of communities said in focus group discussions they had observed significant changes in the weather patterns over time. However, 90 percent perceived these changes to be “due to grace of God” and had no clue how much human activity had contributed to the problem.

While most of the communities recognised that climatic changes would have an impact, none sensed that the problem would impact them, their livelihoods, and their lives the most, even as their contribution to the problem was the least.

Change starts with awareness. Working with communities to build adaptation to climate change, in isolation, is inappropriate if the lack of knowledge about climate change and its effects is not addressed alongside.

Now that we realize the low awareness levels of communities about climate-induced vulnerability, the need of the hour is to start initiating discussions and to equip them with the knowledge they need.

Without that, vulnerability could intensify, with the poor becoming poorer due to increased climate pressures, which the World Bank last year warned could push more than 100 million people into poverty by 2030.

The need to provide civic amenities and access to facilities is always a top priority when talking about the urban poor. But we must recognise that informal settlements are already exposed to multiple stresses and barriers. Before addressing climate challenges in the community, communities need to first have a comprehensive understanding of climate risks, before adaptation efforts get started.

Designing awareness tools and participatory risk assessment exercises in the form of creative games and shows can be an emphatic way to trigger in communities an awareness of their vulnerability to climate perils.

Emergence of this perception among communities has the potential to be a milestone in enabling individuals to cope with climate stresses or shocks and to plan for long-term resilience building.

As Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, rightly says , “Conversation often leads to transformations”. Getting communities talking about vulnerability would certainly transform the way they perceive their future challenges – and help them plan for adaptation.