Project
Gender and Housing Markets
Affordable housing debates have long focused on questions of access and affordability in a way that is undifferentiated by gender. Increasingly, however, practitioners are beginning to notice that there are demand and supply-side characteristics that are particular to women. They have particular challenges, particular capacities, particular needs, that are often overlooked when policy or product innovation seeks to deliver to an income group. In 2021/22, CAHF took on a research project commissioned by the IFC on women’s access to housing finance in Ghana and Senegal. The study found that tapping into the potential market of housing finance for women requires a clear, evidence-based, segmented understanding of the target market; products designed to be responsive to women’s needs and priorities; and a supportive enabling environment. Critically, the study proposed a framework to understand women as a specific target market – women as consumers, suppliers, and home-based entrepreneurs. In practise, there is evidence of women playing a particularly significant role in the MSME sector, operating as small-scale entrepreneurs, or delivering rental accommodation. However, this is poorly documented and there is very little known about how women are currently investing in and financing housing.
CAHF has explored the issue of gender also in other initiatives:
- In 2020, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) published Her Home: Housing Finance for Women, a study to identify the market constraints as well as the cultural, institutional, and policy barriers to women’s access to housing finance in Colombia, India, and Kenya. Building on the report’s insights, the IFC collaborated with CAHF and Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter to conduct diagnostic and scoping assessments in three additional countries. CAHF partnered with the IFC to conduct the research in Ghana and Senegal. A subsequent article published in the Quarterly Journal of the International Union for Housing Finance (2023 Winter Edition) shares insights from the Her Home II Report and main recommendations emanating from the study.
- Our Data Agenda, and specifically the second round of data collection of theMarket Shaping Indicators (MSI-II) had a specific focus on gender. In the data collection cycle of 2022/23, the MSIs incorporated a first effort to round out the picture of gender, climate, and sustainability issues in housing. The data collection was piloted in five African countries namely, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Ghana and Nigeria, applied both qualitative and qualitative approaches to collecting gender and climate data.[1] A key output of the exercise includes the development of a list of potential indicators to track gender in housing markets.
- The Tenure Support Centre (TSC) has been operational since July 2018 and since then has seen over 2000 clients with various property-related issues. A key focus of the TSC has been the issue of women’s access to title deeds.
- Section of B40 dashboard: Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys Program was used to create indicators grouped into five themes. Under the individual indicators theme, the dashboard contains gender disaggregated data measuring access to education, employment rates, access to financial services and levels of homeownership. [3]
- Under the Housing Investment Chronicles Project, CAHF has to some extent explored women’s housing investment activity in Uganda.
- Through the Housing Entrepreneurs Project in South Africa, CAHF has previously explored research focusing on understanding how small-scale landlords and home-based entrepreneurs operate, the key constraints that they face and the extent to which they are using their home as a productive asset
This project aims to achieve a better, more nuanced understanding of women’s investment in housing and the extent to which they seek to improve the social, economic, and financial performance of their homes.
