The first field mission of 2025 for urbaMonde is heading to the Ivory Coast, combining advocacy for inclusive housing finance with the launch of an innovative sustainable housing project in partnership with La Voûte Nubienne. A dual commitment to concrete, local and replicable solutions.
From January 29 to February 6, 2025, a team from urbaMonde — Bénédicte Hinschberger (Project Officer, urbaMonde France) and Pauline Leporcq (West Africa Consultant) — travelled to Ivory Coast for a dual-purpose mission: to take part in a major regional event on affordable housing and to support the launch of a new eco-construction project in partnership with the Nubian Vault Association (AVN).
Promoting community-led housing finance solutions
In Abidjan, urbaMonde participated in the Conference on the Impact of Housing on the Economies of Francophone African Countries, organised by the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF). The conference brought together donors, financial institutions, public actors, and housing practitioners to discuss strategies for developing accessible and sustainable housing across the continent.
Invited to speak, urbaMonde highlighted the potential of community-based savings mechanisms — such as the revolving fund developed by the Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants — which enable populations excluded from the formal banking system to finance their own housing. These community-driven innovations demonstrate that effective, long-term alternatives exist, provided they are recognised, supported, and replicated. This advocacy for community finance aims to establish it as a key component of housing investment and policy frameworks.
Korhogo: launching a sustainable and inclusive housing project
The second leg of the mission took place in Korhogo, in the north of Côte d’Ivoire, where an ambitious project led by the Nubian Vault Association and funded by the Citi Foundation as part of the Global Innovation Challenge is just beginning. The project aims to promote access to sustainable housing through the construction of Nubian vault homes — an ancestral, climate-adapted and ecological building technique — and the training of local masons.
urbaMonde and its Senegalese partner, urbaSEN, are tasked with integrating a community finance component into the project, based on the revolving fund model. In collaboration with the Ivorian Federation of Inhabitants, this mechanism will enable households to access solidarity-based credit to co-finance the construction of their homes.
The mission provided an opportunity to meet with groups of residents in several villages around Korhogo. These exchanges helped assess housing needs, identify existing community savings dynamics, and lay the foundations for a participatory financial mechanism rooted in local practices.
