Pratima Joshi

Founder

Pratima Joshi is the founder of Shelter Associates (1994)[1], an Indian non-profit working on water & sanitation and livelihood from Pune.

Pratima Joshi is an Indian architect and the founder and executive director of Shelter Associates, a Pune-based non-governmental organisation that works on housing, water and sanitation for residents of informal settlements in Maharashtra.

Shelter Associates is known for using detailed household surveys and geographic information system (GIS) mapping of slum settlements to give municipal authorities the data needed to plan services, and for its One Home One Toilet programme, which installs individual toilets in slum households rather than relying on shared community blocks.

Early life and education

Joshi trained as an architect and holds a master's degree in architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning in London.

Career

Joshi founded Shelter Associates in Pune in 1993, together with other architects, with the aim of improving access to infrastructure and basic services for the urban poor rather than pursuing conventional commercial practice.

From the late 1990s the organisation began mapping slum settlements using GIS, combining satellite imagery with household-level surveys. The resulting data has been used by local governments to plan sanitation and housing interventions and to establish the presence of settlements that had previously gone unrecorded.

Shelter Associates' One Home One Toilet programme provides individual household toilets in slum homes on a cost-sharing basis with residents and municipal bodies. The organisation has worked in Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad, Navi Mumbai, Kolhapur and Sangli, and has also run slum rehabilitation, menstrual hygiene and solid waste management projects.

Recognition

Joshi is an Ashoka Fellow. She has received the Google Earth Hero Award, and her work has been covered by the BBC and Forbes.

In 2023 she was recognised at the Aarohan Social Innovation Awards for women's empowerment.[2][3][4][5]

Shelter Associates

Shelter Associates was founded in Pune in 1994 by architect Pratima Joshi to improve equitable access to essential services for the urban poor through data-driven, community-centric solutions. Its programmes include the 'One Home One Toilet' model for individual household toilets, slum rehabilitation and beneficiary-led housing, and GIS-based digital mapping and addressing of informal settlements.

Shelter Associates reports the following, on its own site:

More than 28,000 toilets facilitated, improving conditions for more than 2 lakh individuals
Over 100,000 slum households given digital addresses across four cities in Maharashtra
9,000 individuals rehabilitated from vulnerable slums into better living conditions