A ROOF OVER THEIR HEADS
What Listening to Clients Revealed About the Impact of Housing Finance on Children
Making up half the population of many low-income countries, children and youth are uniquely important to consider in investments to address the challenges faced by people in poverty — including housing finance. But investors who want to make these potentially innovative and life-changing investments are constrained by a lack of data.
THE GLOBAL NEED
Globally, 1.6 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate shelter, yet under-investment in housing for low-income households persists. Families living on dollars a day can face serious risks from unsafe structures or exposure to extreme heat or sewage. Their children’s cognitive development, health, safety and education can be significantly affected by the quality of their housing.
A CHILD LENS: KEY INSIGHTS
Drawing on surveys of microfinance loan recipients across the globe, the child-lens impact assessment approach was developed to help investors and social enterprises capture data to understand, optimize and scale their impact on children.* Insights highlighted in two case studies of housing finance providers in Latin America and the Caribbean, Habitat for Humanity Guatemala and Fundación Dominicana de Desarrollo, suggest a case for integrating a child lens into business and investment strategies to contribute to multi-generational impact and mitigate risks to children. Particularly, these child-lens studies:
Revealed new data to create a richer picture of impact, enabling more evidence-driven ways to communicate outcomes and allocate capital.
Found that housing finance can generate benefits beyond increased safety and security. Benefits included improved climate resilience, greater ability to manage finances and enhanced quality of life.
Identified opportunities to deepen outreach to marginalized children and families through more inclusive housing finance products and more poverty-informed lending practices.
TAKEAWAYS
Applying a child lens to data capture and analysis makes housing finance’s effects on children visible, measurable, and optimizable. Rather than adding complexity, a child lens increases precision — and offers opportunities for a wide range of stakeholders.
Social enterprises providing housing finance can use child-lens impact data to refine housing loan products, expand outreach and attract aligned capital to benefit families living in poverty.
Impact fund managers can use these insights to integrate child-lens signals into investment theses, portfolio analytics and advisory support. Insights can also be used to make the case for scaling impact capital allocation to clientcentered housing finance solutions that deliver impact for children in poverty.
Investors can use this data to make informed decisions about allocating capital to housing finance products as a pathway for impact on children in poverty. Doing so can align capital structures with the lived realities and needs of families with children living in poverty, prompting more precise questions about who benefits from investments and who may be at risk.
“
These findings are proving crucial for strengthening Fundación Dominicana de Desarrollo’s strategy and our products. They will directly inform our strategic planning, help us design new offerings and refine existing ones, and deepen our understanding of our clients’ needs ”
ROSA MARUBENY GARCÍA
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF FDD
“
The study provided us with clear, productlevel insights that we’re now using to refine how we engage with clients and communicate the value of our housing solutions. By understanding how different types of loans impact families with children, we can tailor frontline messaging to better reflect the lived experience of clients.”
DELOREAN RANDICH
NATIONAL DIRECTOR, HABITAT FOR HUMANITY GUATEMALA
* UNICEF USA’s Impact Fund for Children and Global Partnerships partnered with 60 Decibels, an impact measurement company, and VisionFund International, a global microfinance network, to design and implement the child-lens impact assessment approach with a subset of participants in 60 Decibels’ 2025 MFI Index. Global Partnerships used data from those assessments to analyze the housing finance products of the two microfinance institutions highlighted above.