Homeless International

CLIFF (the Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility) is a venture capital facility.  CLIFF enables organisations of the urban poor to access greater public, private and civil society sector resources.  These resources are used for sustainable housing and basic services projects for slum dwellers, which have the potential to be scaled-up to benefit even more people.  These projects result in improved housing and sanitation for significant numbers of people.  In addition, they can be used to influence the policy and practice of banks, governments, international development agencies and others.

Why is it needed?
Where possible, Homeless International supports its partners by providing small-medium grants.  Such grants help partners establish their own loan funds to finance slum redevelopment demonstration projects.  Medium-scale grants help partners further develop their loan funds as they move towards implementing more and often bigger projects.  However, raising even small levels of capital is typically difficult.  The urban poor and their support organisations are often unable to access affordable loans from financial institutions, and yet our partners require increasing levels of capital to reach the stage where their initiatives are scaled-up to settlement or even city-wide level.  CLIFF recognises the need for sustainable access to affordable finance and bridges this gap, often with the support of Homeless International’s Guarantee Fund.

Find out more

• How it works
• Capital Grant criteria
• CLIFF publications