A financial framework for reducing slums: lessons from experience in Latin America

This paper describes how slums have come to house such a significant proportion of the urban population in virtually all low- and middle-income nations. It then discusses a combination of large-scale land development for housing and more efficient upgrading programmes (with attention to keeping down unit costs and integrating microfinance to support house improvement), and how these approaches can greatly reduce the proportion of people living in slums, thus contributing to the Millennium Development Goal of significantly improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. The paper illustrates its points with examples of effective innovations in housing vouchers, land market reforms, and land development programmes from different nations in Latin America.