Shelter Venture Fund
Nurturing innovations that improve housing
The Terwilliger Center’s Shelter Venture Fund invests in and nurtures innovative entrepreneurs and small-but-growing businesses focused on improving housing conditions for the world’s 1.6 billion people living in slums or inadequate housing.
Launched in 2017 by Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter, the fund catalyzes and expands the affordable housing market by investing in shelter entrepreneurs operating in the “pioneer gap” – where early stage companies are often considered too nascent or too risky for conventional venture capital firms. The intent is to accelerate those entrepreneurs’ pathways to reaching low-income families with products and services that improve their housing conditions.
Impact of the Terwilliger Center’s Shelter Venture Fund
- Innovative entrepreneurs and small businesses gain access to funds to grow their operations sustainably.
- Low-income clients gain access to quality goods and services to improve their shelter.
- Housing markets expand, generating employment and livelihood.
“Habitat’s investment was a real game changer for us. … It triggered the forward momentum that brought us to new markets and brought to completion important programming and testing of new technology.”— Nancy Welsh, co-founder and chief marketing officer of iBUILD Global
The Shelter Venture Fund, now positioned to grow its Assets Under Management significantly, has disbursed $2.35 million to seven companies globally:
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Improving health and safety with clean cook stoves
Smoke is one of the biggest health hazards across sub-Saharan Africa. Each year, approximately 550,000 people in the region die from respiratory diseases due to indoor cooking fires. BURN aims to save lives and forests through the design, manufacturing and distribution of clean-burning cook stoves across sub-Saharan Africa to the 2 billion people who will inhabit the region by 2050.
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Improving health and shelter with affordable flooring
Dirt floors in homes contribute to disease globally. EarthEnable is committed to eliminating dirt floors with cheap, easy-to-install, sanitary flooring that can improve the health of low-income families in parts of East Africa, one of the world’s poorest locations. It has successfully installed flooring made of clay earth, sand, gravel, fiber and plant oil in African homes for 10% to 20% cheaper than traditional concrete.
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Reclaiming sewage water with biomimicry
Eighty percent of India’s sewage is untreated. Urban areas are experiencing a water crisis due to higher population demands and dwindling supply resulting from climate change. Treating sewage water is often ignored due to high costs or lack of awareness. The challenges of water pollution, water shortages and the need for reclamation require sustainable, low-cost solutions. EcoSTP created a patented technology to treat and reclaim sewage water based on biomimicry principles. The solution is eco-friendly, zero powered and involves low maintenance. It also addresses seven of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
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Providing low-cost, eco-friendly water heaters
Energryn is committed to solving the water needs of families across Mexico. It offers hybrid solar/electric water heaters called Solesyto with a more eco-friendly technology and at lower cost than market alternatives like liquid petroleum gas/higher-end solar heaters.
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Offering affordable electricity in remote areas
In Mexico, over 600,000 households do not have electricity, and 8.8 million households have only informal access to the grid. Gravity is a marketplace app that connects end users, distributors of sustainable products such as electricity, drinking water, heaters, etc., and microfinance institutions to make these products accessible to low-income households.
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Offering mortgage finance to low-income households
South African banks typically do not lend to low-income borrowers. IBUILD Home Loans is currently the only South African mortgage provider to target these excluded households by offering them mortgage loans to construct “separate entrance rooms.” Upon completion, these rooms must be rented out to cover mortgage costs. They typically generate rental income in significant excess to borrowers’ cost of credit.
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An app for all housing construction stakeholders to interact and transact
Only 55 cents in real housing is built for every $1 invested in the $1 trillion global informal economy. This is due to fraud, graft, supply theft and a lack of transparency throughout the distribution channel. iBUILD Global, a fintech and analytics company, aims to address this challenge by creating financial transparency across the shared ecosystem of funding sources, governments and international agencies. It expects its app to improve resource deployment and unleash latent building capital, by moving investors off the sidelines. It is currently focused on five markets: Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa and India.
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Increasing access to affordable roofing in slums
In India, over 100 million people live in slums where families rely on corrugated metal or asbestos cement sheets to cover their homes. Such products have adverse health effects and are financially and environmentally unsustainable over the long term. ReMaterials, an India-based manufacturer, developed modular roofing panels to address the approximately 16 million Indian households that lack adequate roofing. The product is proprietary technology and is affordable, eco-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. Homes stay cooler in the summer and drier in the monsoon season.
