Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility


The Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility or CLIFF is a finance facility created in 2002, and providing bridge finance and venture capital for housing and infrastructure in developing countries. It is coordinated by Homeless International, with most of the funding coming from DFID and SIDA.
CLIFF is mainly intended to support community-led NGOs and CBOs working on issues of social housing and urban poverty, who do not have otherwise access to mainstream housing finance. It allows communities to implement demonstration projects, in order to secure funding for larger-scale projects.

History

CLIFF was created as the result of a DFID-funded research entitled Bridging the Finance Gap, started in 1999, and first piloted in 2002 in India. A first phase ran between 2002 and 2010, with almost £10 million funded by DFID and SIDA; a second phase is running until 2015, with around £20 million committed by the same funders. CLIFF started in India in 2002, in Kenya in 2005, in the Philippines in 2007, in Nepal in 2010, and in West Africa, Malawi, Angola and Zimbabwe in 2011.