Lanka Financial Services for Underserved Settlements (LFSUS), a non profit company set up in Sri Lanka to provide financial aid for housing for low income settlers in the country through the partnership of the Slum Upgrading Facility of UN-Habitat and the Sri Lankan Government, recently launched its official website www.lfsus.org at the company’s secretariat premises.
The website makes available a comprehensive outlook of the organization’s vision and the achieved outcomes during the past years of operation, the company said in a statement.
LFSUS was created by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-HABITAT) and the Ministry of Urban Development and Sacred Areas Development. “The company counterparts with national goals of poverty eradication by catering a unique stratagem introducing financial inter alia and domestic capital to the poor by building them through the development of bankable projects that promotes affordable low income housing, raising the living standards of the underserved settlements,” it said.
Housing finance over the decades have been expanded significantly throughout the globe, yet a large portion of the low income population in the developing countries still has minimal or no access to long term housing finance, with subsidized loans proven ineffective in improving overall housing. “The key reasons behind has been due to the operations being limited in scale and not sustainable within a long term aspect. In a competitive market LFSUS creates the settings for commercial banks to view housing finance for the low income as an investment opportunity, for banks to set into motion programmes to progressively graduate the underserved through financing affordable houses, which will create future value customers,” the company said adding that this is where LFSUS steps in facilitating low income people in affordable housing projects making low income settlers bankable and creating value for the underserved to be recognized and addressed by the main stream financial institutions.
LFSUS has been in operation since 2007 and during the past years has addressed nearly 2000 beneficiaries with the formation of over 400 households covering Colombo,Ratnapura, Nuwara Eliya, Hambantota, Nawalapitiya and Deniyaya. The loan disbursement totals Rs 52.5 million made up of seven projects. |
E-mail
