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Providing affordable housing for the poor has always been a challenge in Pakistan, but Tasneem Siddiqui is providing a social entrepreneur example of how it can be done by taking an innovative approach to the problem.
Siddiqui funds the development of new homes by selling about 75% of the plots at a cost to families earning $2 to $4 a day, and the rest are developed as prime residential plots and sold at market prices. Further, he stipulates that potential buyers must camp out on the building site during construction.
These kinds of innovations use market-based models to tackle rural poverty, and the success of using business as a tool is attracting the attention and funds of a growing number of philanthropists. For profit companies like Siddiqui’s are proving that they can complement government and charity in solving social problems, especially in taking solutions to scale.
