UA: What Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are you championing?

EE: SDGs #3 and #13 Good Health & Well Being and Climate Action. We initially came out of a class from Stanford’s School of Design, where we were challenged to find a way to make households healthier. Upon realizing that dirt floors caused major health problems for millions of people, we created an earthen floor with 96% fewer carbon emissions and a third of the price of cement. From there, we realized that our impact could go far beyond just the flooring. We uniquely positioned ourselves to develop a sustainable housing and economically inclusive housing industry through our franchise business model and product development lab.

UA: What inspired your moonshot idea?

EE: We believe that the housing sector in the Global South has the potential to make a tremendous cross-cutting impact on health, climate change, and economic development. The backlog of safe and dignified housing in the Global South is staggering due to population growth and the status quo of sub-standard housing.

The housing sector should be given priority by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) due to the vast, unmet needs of housing conditions, the importance of living conditions in the Global South, and the potential for cross-sector impact. Shelters will be constructed regardless, and USAID can play a pivotal role in shaping this construction to be affordable, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable. USAID already has strong guidelines in place with the intention of achieving safe and climate-friendly housing. However, housing development projects constitute only a limited percentage of USAID's current budget; these guidelines are not put into practice effectively.

USAID has the potential to leverage this tremendous potential by enacting policies and projects that support families to live in healthy homes that adapt to and mitigate climate change. More specifically, we recommend that USAID should:

• Finance the development of community-owned, affordable settlements that include sanitation infrastructures to scale up housing solutions that use local materials (such as earth and wood), making sure to stay below a certain threshold of carbon per person.

• Fund research and environmental development (R&D) activities for low-cost and low-carbon building materials that are as durable as high-emissions materials such as steel and concrete.

A fund for housing developments will act as a catalyst for further private-sector investment to scale these developments on a global scale. USAID and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) are uniquely positioned to significantly impact health, livelihoods, and the environment through smart housing projects.

UA: What impact do you wish to see as a result?

EE: We hope to build an inclusive housing industry in the Global South that ensures all people can afford safe and environmentally sustainable homes.

UA: What are you hopeful about in 2023?

EE: I am hopeful about our potential to scale our impact through partnerships. This includes geographic scale through partners who already have rural distribution networks in Rwanda and growth in product lines through R&D partners who are excited to develop new low-carbon technologies that could have wide applications across the Global South.

Link to full step-by-step moonshot policy proposal coming soon.