This is a story from last week, but it’s a great one about mov­ing peo­ple out of the slums of Nairobi. The micro­cre­dit firm Jamii Bora Trust is the sub­ject of this Seat­tle Times article.

One of the prod­ucts that the Trust offers is a low inter­est mort­gage pro­gram. Pay­ments are kept at about the same lev­els as pay­ing rent in the slums. Once they escape the slums, the peo­ple can also eas­ily escape poverty.

Writer Jim Simon vis­ited the vil­lage that the Jas­mii Bora Trust has built.

On the sec­ond night in her new house here, Jane Ngoiri told one of her chil­dren to get some­thing out of the kitchen.

Then she started laughing.

“I told them, ‘It is us talk­ing about a kitchen. A kitchen!’ ” recalled Ngoiri, a for­mer pros­ti­tute who moved with her four chil­dren ear­lier this year from a rented, one-room shanty in the Nairobi slum of Mathare.

“It’s unbe­liev­able.”

Kaputei rep­re­sents an auda­cious leap for both Ngoiri and the Jamii Bora Trust, a Kenyan micro­fi­nance orga­ni­za­tion that began a decade ago lend­ing 50 women beg­gars money to start their own businesses.

About 22 miles out­side of Nairobi, rows of cinder-block houses topped with red tile roofs spread across the plains — the first stage of a new, self-contained town that Jamii Bora hopes will some­day be home to 10,000 peo­ple, schools, shops and small industry.

Ngoiri paid 350,000 Kenyan shillings — about $4,500 — for her two-bedroom house with a kitchen, toi­let and bath. Her mort­gage is around $40 a month — not much more, she says, than what she paid to rent the cramped room in Mathare.

To keep costs down, Jamii Bora is man­u­fac­tur­ing the build­ing mate­ri­als on site, pro­vid­ing jobs to its mem­bers and oth­ers liv­ing nearby. Kaputei is also an eco-town of sorts, with houses pow­ered by solar pan­els and an ambi­tious plan to recy­cle 70 per­cent of the waste­water through man-made wetlands.

“It’s really beyond the wildest imag­i­na­tion of what most micro­fi­nance orga­ni­za­tions are think­ing about,” said Ed Bland, who heads Seattle-based Uni­tus, which pro­vides busi­ness and tech­ni­cal exper­tise and helps raise cap­i­tal for Jamii Bora and other micro­fi­nance groups.

“They are tak­ing on things that oth­ers just com­plain about.”

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