Poor People Living in Poverty constantly struggle to maintain a home.

We’re not talking about maintaining a home like general repairs; we’re talking about the struggle to simply find an adequate place to stay.  Our experiences at Shelter the World has taken us into some distant corners of the globe.  At each place we are keenly interested in learning about poor people living in poverty and their homes.

For poor people living in poverty, gaining access to housing is very difficult.

We’ve all seen pictures of some of the larger slums of the world in Africa and India for example where the population densities are very high and many suffer from extreme poverty.  Most of the people living in those slums actually pay rent for the living spaces they occupy   however; did you know that in order to gain access to a living space the renter must first produce up to 2 years rent in advance?

We understand that we will never eliminate the conditions of being poor, however; people living in poverty have much less than the bare minimum to survive.

Extreme poverty that permeates through a segment of society where production is low and goods and services never leave the community are trapped in a stagnating economic cycle.

Poor people living in poverty do not generally produce products and services that leave the community and as such new money never enters their economy.  Products that are bought and sold in poverty are simply cycles of exchange within the community and each cycle is a little less productive and profitable than the previous cycle.

For this reason we work and partner with organizations that are focused on developing a community and its people so they can export “things” out of the community.  The more that is exported the more new money enters the community and the community is elevated economically.

For Shelter the World, we bring tools and resources to develop housing because we believe that as the community further develops its economic engine through skills, education, and micro-enterprise, the need for adequate housing stock becomes necessary.  However, there is a lack of quality affordable housing for poor people living in poverty to acquire.  The existing housing stock (built for the middle class and above) is elevated too high for people living in poverty to acquire.  The ability to acquire an asset that increases in value is out of reach.   The barrier then is a lack of affordable housing stock for this segment of society.

Poor people living in poverty deserve the opportunity to acquire this very important asset much like we do in the developed world.  So, making affordable housing available is one of our chief aims.

Additionally however, we desire to assist those living in poverty to use housing as a means of producing economic output.  This means we assist the poor in developing housing construction products needed by the middle and upper income housing industry.  When those living in poverty have a stable economic export from their community new money will be brought into the economy making home purchases at the poverty level possible.

So, Shelter the World is doing more than providing simple shelter for those living in poverty.  It is bringing tools and resources to those living in poverty to both improve living conditions through affordable housing at the poverty levels while assisting with creating construction materials that can be exported out of the community and ultimately enhance economic development for the community.

The goal is to help poor people living in poverty utilize housing as a both an economic stimulator and as an affordable place to live.