Housing vulnerable people in developing countries takes more than putting hammer to nail. If you want build a lasting change so that poor people susceptible to natural hazards house themselves more safely, you need a sophisticated, multi-tiered approach that considers technical, educational, and cultural issues. That’s the house that Elizabeth built.

Elizabeth Hausler founded Build Change in response to the persistent yet avoidable loss of life caused by building collapses in earthquakes. Build Change is a nonprofit that works to improve the safety of local building practices and empower communities to continue those practices in culturally appropriate ways.

“We work with people on the ground to design and build better buildings,” Hausler recently told attendees at the opening keynote of the 36th Annual Natural Hazards Workshop. “If you don’t get the architecture right, you’re not going to achieve a long term change in design practice.”

Build Change has trained more than a thousand builders, 2,400 homeowners, and worked with policy makers to provide guidance on earthquake resistant housing that is affordable and accessible to home owners. The group works primarily in Haiti, Indonesia, and China.

Build Change has an innovative six-step process for motivating people to build earthquake resistant housing.

“The first is learn,” Hausler said. “Try to understand why houses collapse and why they didn’t. Do technical and market research to understand how people want to rebuild.”

The next step is to design disaster resistant houses that are appropriate to the culture, followed by improving local capacity by training local engineers to design sound structures. Fourth, stimulate local demand.

“Again, someone’s got to want the house to be earthquake resistant,” she said. “So we have to engage people in this process, and enable them to understand what they need to look for in order to build safely.”

The fifth step is to facilitate access to capital. Build Change does not provide funds itself, but it does work with other organizations to get money to homeowners. If there isn’t enough funding available, the houses are unlikely to be completed properly or completed at all.

Finally, Build Change measures the change both during the reconstruction and beyond. Although some challenges to earthquake resistant construction are technical, many are cultural, financial, or some combination of factors. Hausler raised the issue of concrete block construction in Haiti as an example.

Poor concrete block construction of Haitian buildings was blamed for many of the deaths in the 2010 earthquake. Some of the block issues are technical, Hausler told the audience, but there are also business and financial issues. For instance, many block manufacturers did not have enough space to store the blocks until they were properly cured, so they were sold before they were ready. In addition, block is sometimes sold quickly because the manufacturer needs the cash flow to buy new materials.

Because the material is so firmly embedded in the Haitian economy, it’s impossible to simply prohibit the use of block construction, Hausler said. The prevalence and familiarity also means homeowners will turn to it anyway, so a better option is teaching residents to work with what they have.

“It’s so much easier to work with people to make a small change to an existing way of building than to bring in something completely new,” Hausler said.