Africa

 Joel Bolnick
Joel Bolnick and his colleagues have initiated a program called People's Dialogue on Land and Shelter in South Africa. The program is designed to address problems and consequences of unequal property relations. Through workshops, visits, exchange programs and talking newsletters, Bolnick is helping to build a framework to construct possibilities that serve collective interests and to sensitize people living in informal settlements to their inherent strengths and potentials.

Hany El Miniawy
Hany is introducing low-cost housing to low-income communities by producing appropriate local building material, adopting a participatory approach for transfer of know-how, and using simple and fast building techniques. When applied nationally, Hany's idea will address two of Egypt's major problems: low-income housing shortages and inhumane living conditions in squatter and illegal areas.

John de Wit
John de Wit is currently launching an initiative in South Africa to provide small business sector men and women with credit and training through a group-based, mutual support and savings scheme. Several million unemployed South Africans have turned to the informal sector for survival. Each year, approximately 80% of the fledgling businesses set up in this sector fail, primarily due to the lack of suitable credit.

Asia

Darin Gunesekera
Dr. Darin Gunesekera's stock exchange market in Sri Lanka offers slum dwellers the opportunity to trade in the land they occupy and then choose from new apartments available, making them proud and responsible homeowners.

Salma Awwal Shafi
Salma Shafi, an architect and urban planner, is facilitating cooperation among slum tenants, marginal land owners, commercial banks and developers to construct affordable housing in Bangladesh's mushrooming cities.

Somsook Boonyabancha
Somsook is developing the methodology for "land-sharing", an urban land use innovation built around a mutually beneficial deal between urban squatters and the owner of the land who wishes to develop for commercial purposes. The slum dwellers get new, better, if more dense housing on a back portion of the plot in dispute, and the owner gets the street-front portion freed for immediate development.

Kapil Mondol
Kapil Mondol is moving beyond traditional approaches to microfinancing by introducing microbanking to villagers. Beginning in rural Bengal, Kapil's approach has rapidly spread over the last few years to encompass more than 200 villages, catching the attention of microfinance practitioners who have come from Bangladesh, Africa, and the United States to learn from him.

Latin America

Maria Barbosa
Maria Elisa is building a movement of "Intranquil Tenants" to attack Brazil's staggering urban housing problems and inequity.Maria Elisa's National Association of Intranquil Tenants is a non-profit organization that seeks to provide Brazilian citizens with housing stability. It seeks to stimulate the development of a national housing policy that will take into account the realities of all individuals that have no property, consider housing subsidies, and introduce to Brazil the French idea of social leasing.

Leonardo Roque Pessina Bernini
Leonardo Roque Pessina Bernini is working in Sao Bernardo, Brazil, an industrial, highly unionized satellite of Sao Paulo. He is empowering the poor families of Sao Paulo's favelas (slums) to take control and ownership of their own housing and well-being.

Salomón Raydán
Salomón Raydán has created an alternative banking and credit system in Venezeula in which low-income citizens both invest in and borrow from communal banks by drawing corporate banks into a network that offers more advanced financial services.

Isabel Cruz
Isabel Cruz is expanding rural savings cooperatives in Mexico to include access to bank credit for campesinos.After years of working with rural peasant movements in Mexico, Isabel Cruz concluded that it was necessary to create a credit system that would foster small-scale local development.