When Tackling Homelessness, Prevention is Often the Best Medicine

In combatting poverty, a giant informal economic system has quietly emerged in Africa. Women participate in micro-finance organizations that loan money in order to allow them to create businesses and become self-managing.

Many subprime borrowers in the United States are financially unable to buy a home themselves. An unconventional lender is trying to make it easier for low-income people to buy houses despite the tighter requirements that other lenders adopted after the mortgage bust.

A overview of 2014's Fixes columns - connecting the dots between 60 or so ways that people are trying to change the world.

As a blight-reduction and urban-development effort, the city of Newark sold bare lots in a distressed area to families willing to build a house and live in it for five years.

Poor people are less likely to make smart financial decisions; however, new research in the U.S. says this is not about intelligence but rather about a brain being overwhelmed with issues related to poverty. To combat that barrier of stress, organizations around the world are making financial decisions easier for people experiencing poverty by making borrowing easier and automating future financial planning, like 401(k) contributions.

The non-profit Root Capital created a lending initiative in Mexico which helps mid-size rural farmers gain access to capital, skills, and consumer markets from which they would otherwise be excluded.

Foreclosure affects millions of homeowners and millions more owe more on their mortgages than what their homes are worth, but Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People (ESOP), offers assistance. As a free service to borrowers, ESOP holds lenders accountable with fair lending agreements, creates constructive communication, and ultimately saves homes.

New York City suffered from fires that erupted in overcrowded, run-down apartments. Then the city sleuthed through residential records and found that landlords who foreclosed let their properties fall apart and ignored safety-code violations. Greater Toronto wants to expand upon New York City’s method by using transportation surveys, census data and computer data to build transit lines.

This is a column on an important new development program in use in at least 40 developing countries: give the poor cash payments, contingent on their use of health clinics and their children’s school attendance, to help break the cycle of poverty.

54 million people in the United States, and 4.5 billion globally, have no credit to their name - making it nearly impossible for them to buy homes, apply for jobs and receive loans. Investors and lenders make an effort to help those with 'invisible credit' scores in financing essentials like homes or cars.