New publication now available – join us for the launch webinar on December 4th

From 2024 to 2025, urbaMonde, together with nine grassroots organisations from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, collaborated to systematise nine community-led financial mechanisms. The outcome is a comprehensive publication that highlights the history and functioning of these mechanisms, the main challenges they face, and the best practices that enabled their establishment and growth.

Around the world, the housing crisis is deepening. As cities become financialised and housing turns into a commodity, millions of families – especially in the Global South – are pushed further away from the possibility of a safe, affordable home. Yet in the midst of this global challenge, communities are creating their own solutions.

For decades, residents in informal neighbourhoods have been organising themselves to save collectively, access land, finance housing, and improve their living conditions. These community-led financial mechanisms (CLFMs) – from savings groups to revolving funds and cooperatives – show that when people control their own resources, they can drive powerful social, economic, and urban transformation.
Our new publication, Community-led Finance for Adequate Housing, brings together nine experiences from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, documenting how community-led finance works in practice and the impact it creates. What emerges across all cases is a shared story of:

• Community ownership and democratic decision-making
• Financial inclusion, especially for women and marginalised groups
• Local resilience, with money reinvested in housing, livelihoods and social needs
• Strong networks and federations that scale solutions city-wide
• Long-term collaboration between communities, support organisations, and public authorities

Far beyond financial tools, CLFMs are catalysts of empowerment — enabling families to build decent homes, strengthening leadership, and shifting power toward those who are too often excluded from formal systems.

▶ Download the full study here (in English, PDF, 9 MB)

Join us for the launch webinar

To mark the publication’s release and open space for dialogue, we invite you to the official launch webinar on December 4th at 14:00 CET. Partners from across the three regions will share insights, lessons learned, and recommendations for strengthening community-led finance as a pathway toward housing justice.
👉 Register here
(Interpretation available in English, French, and Spanish)