NEEV

It is estimated that more than 1 billion people, almost 25% of all urban population, live in informal settlements. UN Habitat estimates that in the next 15 years, three billion people will live in substandard homes.

Lack of affordable housing, weak governance, displacement caused by rural-urban migration, conflicts, natural disasters and climate change are all factors that are driving these numbers up, making informal settlements one of the dominant characteristics of a large proportion of present and future cities. 

Behind the edification of such structures is the process of incremental construction. Implemented also in rural areas, it is identifiable by a lack of access to trained construction professionals, the absence of an approval and monitoring processes. As a result, a common factor across these contexts is the poor safety of the structures and and quality of the houses, especially their thermal performance and resilience to extreme weather. 

Housing and the growth of cities are strictly connected to energy consumption because of how we heat and cool them. Housing counts for 30% of the global gas emissions. Professional construction inputs could improve these performances and reduce the impact on the environment.

Incremental housing often oversees this aspect mainly because of a lack of awareness on new and better construction techniques or materials. As a result, not only these units have an extremely poor thermal efficiency but also create living conditions that negatively affect their inhabitants (high and low temperatures, poor ventilation and high levels of humidity and pollution).

(Attempted Solutions, so far) Agencies and governments across the world are working to implement programs to provide construction technical assistance to vulnerable groups. One of the key challenges of these programs is reaching scale in providing door-to-door CTA. All attempts at addressing this point have so far shown big limits as professional architectural and engineering expertise is limited, expensive and resource intensive.

While digital solutions have been critical to solve the challenge of reaching scale in similar social endemic problems in other fields (like healthcare and agriculture), so far the existing digital technologies related to the building sector are expensive and developed to be used only by professionals. As a result, the use of digital technology in the above programs has only been marginal. 

What is in place today to solve this issue is based on training program to improve the construction mason's skills and/or printed manuals on how to build better. Both solutions are not really efficient as the training il limited in time and hard copy manuals cant be updated or disseminated as easily.

NEEV is a digital solution that allows people with no technical background to create housing construction cost estimates, bill of quantities and construction manuals with drawings and structural details through a simple interface and a highly customizable process.

Through the mobile interface of NEEV anyone can create and share customized technical inputs within minutes enabling a disruptive process that has the potential to influence the construction of millions of buildings in a way never possible until now.

NEEV automatically gathers local climate and other parameters (based on the geo-localization of the projects) to generate specific inputs related to materials, construction systems and technologies that if implemented can improve the thermal efficiency of the buildings (reducing future energy consumption). 

Both a web and mobile app, NEEV is specifically designed to support all the stakeholders working in the incremental housing context with the aim to tackle the missing piece of this sector: construction quality. By providing construction technical assistance to everyone, NEEV can improve building resilience and sustainability at scale.

NEEV is developed to be adopted in different geographies and countries. It is multi-language; it supports different housing typologies, constructive techniques and materials to adapt to local practices; it’s customizable in materials and labor rates.

NEEV is specifically designed to support low-income communities living in informal settlements. As today, the majority of dwellers living in these areas share substandard living standards and get zero expert support in relation to how to build safe and sustainable houses.

If low-income dwellers can access and implement the customized solutions generated by NEEV, they'll have the opportunity to build (or retrofit) houses that are safer, with higher living standards (due to better performance) that  will consume less energy.

Based on our years of research and work across countries, we discovered that poor housing quality is not a consequence of poverty but the result of lack of good inputs. Consider for instance the layout of a house. Placing the windows in a particular way, shaping the roof or the orientation of the building in a specific way, are all inexpensive solution that can dramatically improve light and ventilation (reduce or improve the inner temperature during extreme climates)and thus the thermal performance of a house. 

Not only NEEV solve the problem of access to construction inputs, but it can also be used to disseminate new and innovative products or construction solutions that can contribute to make hoses more resilient to extreme weather and reduce the carbon footprint impact considering the all construction cycle. 

Often specific solutions are successfully applied in certain contexts or geographies but they remain confined there due to various barriers. It is possible that a new type of roof or brick or solar panel that is successfully adopted in India could be a perfect solution for a same climate zone in Africa, however it is also unlikely that the same solution will reach there, especially in the low-income and informal contexts. 

NEEV has the ambition to become an international tool able to work as a compendium of technical construction solution and materials giving vulnerable communities the chance to inform and empower themself in relation to housing construction.

To deliver our solution (NEEV) mHS formed a strategic partnership with the GEM Foundation to improve and distribute NEEV. We are now currently working on a partnership with Trellis Housing Finance that will be the key partner to promote the adoption of NEEV in Pakistan. 

With this consortium in place we can say to be the right team to design and deliver our solution.

GEM offers one of the world’s most complete sources of risk resources and a globally accepted standard for risk assessment (their digital products are used and adopted by public, private and academic institutions worldwide from over 150 countries). The Trellis' team of experts has a combined 150+ years of industry experience across affordable housing, micro-finance & finance background and has a great presence and outreach across Pakistan.

As per our (mHS) capacity to understand and represent the communities we serve,  the Team Lead and his co-founder well understand the importance of being close to the challenges and related communities in order to design solutions (when the decision to start mHS was taken, we immediately move from Cambridge in US to New Delhi).

What the question here descrive as "proximity to communities" can also find a parallel in the first stage of the design thinking process, a first critical step that require patience, empathy, curiosity and a strong connection with the people. At mHS we apply this process on all our projects and, in order to understand the needs of of our target groups, since 2009 we have been spending a great deal of time with our team within the informal settlements of India and other Countries. It is also by engaging and creating partnerships with local CBOs and NGOs that we have always ensured the right approach, respect and access to the communities we worked with.

For this particular solution, we are aware of the challenges that we have to face to introduce this solution. It can be extremely challenging to disrupt a current system (we refer here to the incremental house processes) when the same one has been implemented with decades and become the norm.

After various tests and pilots we realized the importance of having committed strategic partners able to bring to the table the right incentives for the various stakeholders and especially for the endusers.

[in the past-until COVID-19] To deliver our solution NEEV,  we have been training over one hundred agents from microfinance institutions, housing finance companies and NGOs as well as low-income masons. Everyone was able to adopt NEEV with minimal onboarding. As of today, between the various user groups of NEEV, thousands of project estimates have been created and hundreds of construction manuals have been generated and shared using NEEV. The NEEV analytics and the response of specific interviews with company’s agents, confirm a clear benefit for their operations and for their customers. A qualitative research with about 50 households and masons over a period of 6 months also indicate a positive interest in NEEV and its impact. 

[currently] Currently the people accessing NEEV is extremely limited. During the Covid-19 pandemic our partners in India faced serious problems and our plan to have NEEV adopted stalled. Moreover, based on the experience of the past pilots, the mHS team realized that to maintain and scale NEEV it was necessary to have the right technical capacity and a strong partner already serving the communities we were targeting. As a result in the past year we focused on strategic partnerships. With our partnership with GEM we did achieve to solve the technical part while with the ongoing discussion with Trellis we aim to solve the last critical part related to the dissemination of the solution within the targeted communities.

[from now on] Trellis has a presence and is currently operating in the main three cities of Pakistan, Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Around fifty agents are on field and connected with the communities. With the support of the NEEV technology Trellis aims to promote and offer a housing product for incremental housing. The product will be launch in June or July 2023 and the goal is to serve 150 families within the first 12 months. We are looking to impact about 2000 people in the next 3 years. 

The main challenge that we need to solve to disseminate our solution is the behavioral aspect related to the decisions taken by low-income dwellers (during incremental housing processes) that can be a barrier for the acceptance and adoption of NEEV.

We strongly believe that to overcome this challenge we need to partner with other organizations that the endusers trust and able to offer them key incentives. As the partnership with Trellis can be key to distribute our solution in Pakistan, we do need more of such partnerships for other countries.

One of our big challenges, being a small and niche organization, is for us to be able to reach out and be connected with potential partners that can help us to achieve our goal to make NEEV becoming a standard solution. 

While funding still remain (at least at this stage) a critical need and despite the fact that we have a decent network, it is critical that more people will know bout our solution. The Solve call is a great opportunity for us to connect with other solvers and to be part of the MIT network of leaders and experts. If selected, the exposure that we could get will be fantastic for our project.

Given the stage of the project and the potentials to scale up NEEV globally, having access to mentoring and coaching can also be as well critical for our success.

We are proposing a way to leverage the technologies we have developed (NEEV) to make construction technical assistance available at scale and eventually catalyze and improve housing safety, quality and sustainability for vulnerable groups in way never achieved before.

By leveraging digital technology, a decentralized and bottom-up approach can enable a skill-transfer process to local non-technical personnel, creating a network of agents that will democratize the access to construction technical assistance, a service that has historically been hindered for vulnerable groups.

The core activity of our program is to make NEEV available to all the stakeholders in the incremental housing sector across geographies.

This program looks at the adoption and scale phase in order to make the impact of NEEV more and more tangible, measurable and replicable.

The combination of the benefits of top down organized intervention and of organic bottom-up empowerment can enable safe and quality construction practices across regions. NEEV will constitute for the agents involved in top-down institutional programs a powerful tool based on a common language with low-income communities.

The strategy for this program will follow a similar approach to that GEM (our partner) has implemented since its inception. Created as a response to the fact that there were no global standards defined to study and evaluate seismic risks, the GEM program, in order to maximize its social impact, develops digital products and makes them freely available for non-commercial, public-good applications. The GEM’s strategy proved to be very successful. 

With this program we aim to bring NEEV to the same position, freely available for the general public and a standard for the sector.

By providing access to the digital tool and parallel support for capacity building and implementation to partners, we aim to improve the outcome of programs where CTA is a key component. Moreover, we also see an opportunity to support current programs targeting low-income groups, where CTA is not provided due to its inherent costs.

In 2022 the number of smartphone users is approaching 6.56B; this accounts for more than 83% of the world population. Smartphones are today and will be even more in the future, the single worldwide spread technology that we all have in common, regardless of our wealth, education level, spoken language, job and country. Their diffusion represents a unique opportunity for spreading knowledge and new technological solutions.

Thanks to NEEV and smartphones, safer building practices can become accessible to millions of people.

NEEV has been developed in its current interface to be adopted by people with a fair level of digital literacy and after receiving an onboarding training on how to use it. 

In the past months and years NEEV has been adopted by agents of MFIs, NGOs, housing finance agencies, technical personnel and masons that have been offered some sort of training. The positive aspect is that often a couple of hours of training have been enough for people with a certain understanding of construction systems (masons, professionals) to start using NEEV. In case of agents of NGOs, MFIs and in general people with no construction technical background, we extended the training to couple of half-days to cover the key aspect needed to understand and insert the right inputs of a project. This was eventually sufficient to have the trained groups able to create customized projects documents.

In the next year we will focus on NEEV adoption working with agents of agencies with the aim to make it part of the companies' operations and thus reach our target group. This will also lead to prove our business model as we will aim to sign SaaS contracts with such agencies.

In the next years will also work to improve the interface of NEEV so that it can be ready to be adopted and used by anyone even without a training.

Overall, the data collected from a leading housing finance company in India that has been a key partner during the development of NEEV, indicate that between 2019-21 over 70 agents regularly used NEEV to generate over 3,000 estimates. Considering the market  average cost of 1800 Rupees/estimate, this converts to over 100,000 USD being saved by companies’ beneficiaries. This incentive can lead to the adoption of NEEV and the opportunity to share construction inputs to thousands of families.

A wide activity of user tests and impact measurement will be carried out to especially ensure that the technical inputs will be adopted and to measure the impact on building's quality.

The impact of our program will be measured with specific metrics that can't be defined at this stage and that will depend of each specific partnerships.

In the case of the project that we are hoping to implement in Pakistan in the next months we will be both quantitative, with analytics generated by software & surveys, and qualitative, through field reports, surveys and focus group discussions.

Some of the possible key metrics will be:

1. Analytics from NEEV:

• Number of estimates/BOQs and manuals created by Trellis' agents

• Number of estimates/BOQs and manuals shared with households

Survey of masons and households

• Surveys on the impact of NEEV — various metrics to be defined to ideally be conducted multiple times with the same mason/homeowners

Other metrics

• More possible metrics will be defined during the course of the Pilot

Aside from the analytics, the final aim of this Project will be to have detailed qualitative feedback, thus a good evaluation of the impact of NEEV especially in regards to housing thermal performances and safety.

The user interactions and pilots we conducted in the past have proven our theory of change: 

By adopting digital technology people with no technical background can, through their mobile connected devices, generate, share and use estimates, bill of quantities and construction customized inputs. 

Our theory of change solve one of the key issue behind substandard housing, the fact that millions of dwellers have no way to access customized technical construction advice. Detailed project estimates and technical drawings used to require specialized professionals and days of work. Through the mobile interface of NEEV anyone can create and share the same within minutes.

Based on UN Habitat "more than 1 billion people, almost 25% of all urban population, live in informal settlements [...] in the next 15 years, three billion people will live in substandard homes".

By leveraging technology we have the opportunity to influence the construction of each single house. Small and often inexpensive changes can make the difference between a poor and unsafe building to a safe and better performing one. 

By providing construction technical assistance to everyone, NEEV can improve building resilience and sustainability at scale.

It is critical to undertake a different path if we want to allow humanity to build better cities and adequate housing: a basic human right.

NEEV is a digital solution, developed by mHS Global Impact, that allows people with no technical background to create housing construction cost estimates, bill of quantities and construction manuals with drawings and structural details through a simple interface and a highly customizable process.

Neev is a cloud based software with a web and mobile interfaces. Its API can be access to ensure integration with other digital systems and the software architecture is designed to be able to be mapped for different countries and sub-regions. The backend is based on an original algorithm and database powered by a BIM (Building Information Modeling) methodology and algorithm to generate the customized graphics.

The NEEV interfaces are of various tiers, tailored for construction workers, architects and engineers as well as institutions and agencies and allows to guide financial planning, edification and monitoring of safety and quality in buildings.

NEEV is multi-language; it supports different housing typologies, constructive techniques and materials to adapt to local practices; it’s customizable in materials and labor rates.

Historically and as a results of the founder's wish, the mHS team has always been multicultural and multidisciplinary across the years. We value diversity as we believe to be key for creativity and well-being of our team. Since 2009 our team members came from over 8 countries bringing a variety of cultures, gender types, races, colors, sexual orientations, religions, age and so.

Currently, our Foundation registered in the Netherland has its own related Policy to ensure that no discrimination can be part of the selection for our team at any stage and to ensure equality and fairness for everyone.

The business model at the base of our solution and considered for its distribution/adoption is based on freemium model and a B2B2C strategy. Our plan is to generate revenue by offering NEEV as a SaaS (Software as a Service) to agencies already serving such communities. More revenue will be also generated by offering software customized support and training sessions to these agencies.

We do offer NEEV free for low-income dwellers at no cost following a freemium model where a simple version of NEEV is free and a more comprehensive software is available for agencies of various types).

These agencies often already have developed or use third-party digital systems to manage their CRM and operations, however the construction technical data is almost always not integrated and constitute a challenge. 

For the development of NEEV and in our past pilots we have closely worked with agencies offering housing finance to low-income communities. These organizations mainly rely on local architects and engineers to estimate the project costs, approve and monitor constructions and decide when to release funding (loans are usually disbursed in tranches based on construction progress). Rarely they provide technical construction advices to their clients given the associate costs. 

By adopting NEEV the above listed activities can be done in minutes instead of days, the data can be integrated in their other digital systems and with no extra costs, customized inputs can be shared with their beneficiaries. The benefits for the agencies are multiple: improve of speed in operations, less dependance of technical professionals and reduce related costs, reduce risk of default (given more precise estimates) and especially the opportunity to sponsor more safe and sustainable houses.

Our model focus on such agencies cause they are offering a very attractive product to their customers (housing finance) with whom they usually have a great understanding and relationship. By adopting NEEv we do create a win-win for all three parties. The agencies achieve better business, we reach our target group and fulfill our social goal for better houses and low-income communities can access a premium product (housing finance + construction assistance). 

While the above is our main business models, we have also drafted others models thinking at other stakeholders involved. 

Construction material companies for instance value the incremental housing context (often a significant share of their clientele) but have little data about this client segment, NEEV could offer a way to gather such data while advertising their product. (Advertising fees.)

Innovative companies offering new solutions (new building materials, construction technologies, sustainable solutions to produce electricity, water &sanitation etc.) often need to invest large amounts of money to promote their products, NEEV can be an easy platform where to promote the same and with a target logic (since NEEV has the potential to identify the projects where each consider solution can apply by filtering the inputs). (Advertising fees.)

Governments, evaluators, builders are another stakeholders that later on could also adopt NEEV under other business models.

At this stage we do still depend on grants. It has been extremely complicated to develop the technology behind NEEV and it is through the support of various donors (above all CISCO in US), some in-kind support (mainly SVAM International, a software company and and David Book, a silicon valley veteran) and some awards that we did manage to do so.

We will rely on grant support to continue or business development and solutions improvement until we will secure enough SaaS contracts able to make us sustainable.

When a certain number of organizations will adopt NEEV, the SaaS fees and that related to the services associated will ensure the financially sustainability of the team maintaining NEEV, the associate technical costs and will cover the investment needed to further improve the solution and continue business development to scale its adoption and impact.

In a near future and when our solution will be adopted in few regions, we will look at other business models (including service contracts with governments, international agencies, material companies) and, more critically, we will also look at social investment funds.

Regarding the NEEV solution, aside the grants we secured so far for NEEV (Cisco USA, Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter -over 300K) we did managed to raise some seed capital by offering NEEV to one of the leading housing finance companies in India. Our agreement allowed us to not only get part of the seed money we needed but especially to develop and test NEEV with the team of the HFC across various cities in India.

As per the business model that is based on the partnerships with agencies offering housing finance to eventually improve the housing quality in low-income settlements, we prove it right long ago when in 2010 when we (mHS) partnered with a leading micro-finance agency in India (BASIX). The pilot was possibile thanks to the support of the DELL Foundation
In that pilot project (the DHS project), we created a new product that bundled technical assistance with housing finance offer. The same was offered to the resident of a low-income settlement in Delhi (Mongolpuri). 

After conducting awareness campaigns within the community about the need for safe and efficient housing, our combined team selected interested families after socio-economic and technical visits. The response has been great, the demand was high and eventually we did manage to serve over 30 households (in 2020 the project eventually closed with over 98% of the repayment completed). 

Through the pilot we proved that it was possible to improve the quality and safety of the houses and also that BASIX customers were willing to pay a fee for the construction technical assistance. However we also realized that the business model could not scale as the technical aspect of the operations was too expensive. At the time we were relying on local architects and engineers and we did face multiple issue, above all the HR costs, the inconsistency of professionals skills and the fact that was really difficult to hire and retain them (now you know why we eventually developed NEEV!).