Winners of World Bank Call for Papers

IUHF is pleased to be part of a successful collaboration with the World Bank, and to offer publication to two excellent articles on affordable housing selected as the winner and runner up in a competitive Call for Papers issued by the World Bank in early 2020. The latest Call for Papers follows a successful Call in 2018, when the two winners presented their articles at the World Bank Affordable Housing Conference in Washington DC following which they were published in HFI. This year’s Call for Papers on “Partnerships in Affordable Housing” was if anything even more successful, resulting in the submission of over 100 abstracts. These were studied by
a panel of judges who shortlisted nine articles for detailed scrutiny.

Eventually, the winning article was identified as:

• Affordable housing finance for informal workers, by Widya Estiningrum, Achwal Farisi, Wahyu Lubis and Yesi Septiani.
This article focusses on Indonesia and, having identified the difficulties faced by households in the non-formal sector in gaining access to housing finance for homeownership, goes on to look at an innovative solution pioneered for self-employed drivers operating as partners in an umbrella organisation which undertakes
much of the administration of loans.

The runner up was:

• Partnership and financial innovation: Reall and unlocking affordable housing markets in Africa and Asia, by Andrew Jones, Lisa Stead and Lucy Livesley.
In a well-researched article, Jones et al look at the failure of banks and other institutions to serve the poorer households and those in the informal sectors. They go on to recount the role of Reall and partners in building relationships with banks and other housing finance institutions to create a viable market and make finance more available on reasonable terms and with minimised attendant costs.