Taking Shelter : Practical Action Publishing : 9781788530347 : 1788530349 : 29 Oct 2020 : PUBLISHING NOVEMBER 2020 How do low-income families, representing some 70% of the world's population, finance home building and improvements ? and how is the financial sector, from microfinance institutions and banks to investors and regulators, changing to serve their needs? The practice of housing microfinance has evolved substantially, with a large number of innovations across the entire housing financing ecosystem. New research methodologies, such as financial diaries, have yielded a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how poor households use finance, both formal and informal, to construct their homes. The housing finance industry is also growing. The home improvement loans that are at the heart of housing microfinance are offered in hundreds of institutions, leading to important lessons on how they work. Meanwhile, a new class of institutions ? micro-mortgage lenders ? have emerged