Our investment empowers more people to access credit so they can buy a home
India faces a significant affordable housing shortfall, with an estimated 22 to 30 million affordable homes needed by 2030. Lack of access to credit is a major barrier to home ownership. Many people working in the informal jobs market or in self-employed roles, particularly women, are unable to prove their income through payslips or tax returns. This leaves them unable to access credit and locked into insecure or overcrowded housing.
Shubham Housing Development Finance Company (Shubham) is bridging this lending gap by making home loans available to underserved borrowers. Instead of relying on formal documentation such as payslips, Shubham’s customised scoring model uses data collection, predictive analytics and machine learning to build a picture of each applicant. Roughly 80 per cent of Shubham’s customers are women co-borrowers, while 13 per cent are sole women borrowers.
We first invested $37 million in Shubham in June 2022, followed by a further $10 million in December 2024. Since then, the business has scaled rapidly: its customer base has increased from 33,000 to 80,000 active borrowers. Following a recent partial share sale, we remain a significant minority shareholder, and continue to support Shubham as it expands access to affordable housing finance across India.
