Ontario Village concept is to establish or improve similar Canadian village components in a selected (poor) village in South Asian and West African countries. Basic Canadian village equipped with a library, children's play ground, water and sanitation facilities, community centre for children and adult activities, shopping complex and surrounded by neghibourhood (Homes).  
Ontario Village Program (OVP) helps communities to live where all human beings are in equal value and sharing resources. This Program believes poverty is an injustice which must be overcome. Poverty makes people more vulnerable to conflict and natural calamity; much of this suffering can be prevented, and must be relieved. People's vulnerability to poverty and suffering is increased by unequal power relations. For example, gender, race, class, caste and disability. Women, who make up a majority of the world's poor, are especially disadvantaged. OIDA is working with local supportive groups to build a safer world, in which people take control over their own lives and enjoy their basic rights. OIDA's Ontario Village Program also believes in overcoming poverty and suffering which involves changing unjust policies and practices.

Ontario Village Program selects vulnerable communities in local villages and supports them to enhance living standards while installing or improving Ontario Village components one by one. New settlers will be inhabited within natural village community and both will share village facilities. All the components of Ontario Village wide spread and sharing existing infrastructure. There is no definite bench mark for Ontario Village and new facilities are scattered around the nebhourhood and it will help to improve living standards for both new settlers and natural inhabitants. In simple means Ontario Village is not only a housing complex.

Land availability is playing an important role for establishing Ontario Village components. Housing clusters are varying from one single house to 8 houses and are scattered around the village. Plot size, access to existing infrastructure  plays major role when designing and developing Ontario Village components. OIDA's Ontario Village concept help new settlers to share major existing infrastructure facilities of the village such as school, hospital, roads, electricity, telecommunication facilities etc. Main objective of the Ontario Village concept is to alleviate poverty of existing village, sharing new facilities provided under Ontario Village Program.

Ontario Village Management:
Ontario Village council will be formed to manage day to day activities and maintenance of the village components. Ontario Village council consists with natural and new settlers. OIDA will provide training for council members to manage village activities effectively.  Ontario village culture is seeking to make a difference in the world.

Economic and Human Resources Components:

Ontario Village activities are mainly supported by Ontario Village inhabitants and it will be additional income to them. For Building houses and other development activities, local manpower and local materials will be used. The Community centre will run programs to develop skills for youth and adults. In addition to that, the library will run a parallel programs in their human resources centre. OIDA provide micro credit or micro loan for settlers to use their skills bring bread on the table. 

Concept of Housing:
The poor, worldwide, resort to all sorts of means to house themselves in the face of a housing industry and policies that fail to provide them with affordable options. In the last fifty years, as rural to urban migration expanded across all regions, the practice of self-help housing resulted in vast housing settlements which have baffled governments and society. At times, urbanization itself was put to blame for exacerbating this problem. However, a better understanding of the long-term urbanization process—and of its increasing pace in the last century—has shown it to be universal, unavoidable and even desirable. Also, throughout this period, except for a few enlightened cases, public policies with respect to these housing settlements have swayed from open hostility, physical removal, and open denial, to, at best, piece-meal and reluctant introduction of a few urban services. Very often, sheltering the poor was looked at as if it were a problem of insufficient commercial housing supply to be resolved via complex financing schemes and granting of subsidies. In most cases, such approaches have proved ineffective. In the last decade, public policies with respect to the housing settlements of the poor changed significantly. Increasingly, governments as well as multilateral and bilateral organizations are learning lessons—on the importance of good governance, and on allowing housing markets to work unimpeded—as the poor make efforts to house themselves.

The housing of the poor

Self-help and informality. It is common knowledge that the vast majority of the urban poor, and indeed the very poor, live in dire physical conditions, of which vulnerable and crowded dwellings and a deficiency, or absolute lack of urban services are the most apparent features. Indeed, the living conditions of the poor are tough and varied. They may simply live in the streets, sometimes in such large numbers that communities are formed such as in central Bombay; they may squat on public land, commons, or land with undefined or disputed property rights, frequently as permanent solutions, as in the rapidly expanding cities of most of the developing world; they may settle in legal or illegal land subdivisions on the peripheries of cities where they gradually build their houses and may eventually obtain provision of urban services; they may rent rooms in subdivided formal housing which were previously inhabited by higher income groups, in the center of large cities; or they may occupy precariously functioning and large high-rise housing complexes, conceived and implemented through governmental programs more common in but not unique to non-market economies, as can be observed in many large cities of Asia and Latin America. Of the above types, squatters and peripheral subdivisions constitute the vast majority of housing for the poor and are frequently termed informal settlements due to their lack of property titles and their non-conformity to municipal urban plans, norms, and regulations.

A solution, not a problem. Despite its physical conditions, the housing of the poor may be seen as an important expression of human ingenuity and effort, reflecting important strategies to cope with an environment that is negligent, if not hostile, to the needs of the poor. These strategies, pursued individually or in groups, are the means through which the poor, rationally, strive to fulfill their housing preferences in a least-cost manner, within the limitations of their budget. Given the prevailing levels of income and other constraints, informal settlements can therefore be said to be solutions, not problems.

The housing of the poor is not static. There is plenty of evidence that gradualism and sweat equity—the use of their own labor in constructing their houses and settlements—given time, transform the housing of the poor into acceptable housing solutions. Markets are quite active in informal settlements; realtors are not uncommon; renting of smaller spaces or of full houses, is normal practice. Housing units are frequently bought and sold, though these carry a discount due to the lack of property titles and the presence of negative externalities. In fact, there is also evidence that processes such as gentrification and filtering—the movement of the housing stock across income groups—which are part of the development of cities everywhere, are also common to informal settlements. In this sense, informal settlements tend to emulate the formal city of which they are part not only physically but also in its social transformations.

Negative externalities. However, as a number of analysts have pointed out, many informal settlements carry a number of problems related to the way they were originated and developed. Squatters chose locations which are environmentally sensitive, such as the shores of bodies of waters, or risky, such as hilly slopes and rights-of-way for public services (transmission lines, gas pipelines, or transport corridors). Also, informal settlements develop in a haphazard way, without definition of proper rights-of-way for vehicular circulation and infrastructure. These ubiquitous negative externalities indicate, on the one hand, the lack of will or power of governments to enforce environmental legislation and, on the other, the lack of mechanisms of collective action or the presence of some level of regulation to guide the development of informal settlements.

The nature of housing policies for the poor

Learning from the poor. All formulators of policies increasingly agree that the design of more appropriate urban policies for the poor requires that a set of elements be culled from the experience of the poor themselves. This must include the acknowledgement of the role played by sweat equity; the acceptance of the gradual nature in which the housing and the settlements of the poor grow, guided by the changes in family structure and in the short-term fluctuations and long-term increases in family income; a clearer definition of property rights; the creation of mechanisms to support collective action and control externalities; and the creation of poor-specific financing mechanisms, which take into account the need for loans of small amount, poor credit records of borrowers, and the short-term fluctuations of their incomes.

Governance. They also agree that attention ought to be paid to three basic governance issues: i) decentralization of responsibilities to local governments; ii) introduction of private sector participation in the provision of urban infrastructure; and iii) the increasing participation of civil society in the definition and implementation of housing policies for the poor. Finally, most parties would also agree that the role of central governments remains extremely important in "scaling up" local experiences. The Cities Alliance is conducting a study in which it evaluates important "scaling up" efforts that are being attempted in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Mauritania, Morocco, South Africa, Tunisia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

A broad and country-specific set of solutions

There is no single solution to the problem of providing housing for the poor. Most countries ought to adopt a number of approaches in order to satisfy different sub-markets; for example, the segment of households with incomes high enough to jump the frontier between informality and formality, squatters or slum dwellers who require the continued gradual improvement of their homes, or new poor households, whether these be migrants or existing urban dwellers. The emphases to be given to each of the above will, of course, depend on the country’s level of income, rate of urbanization and proportion of poor.

Formal housing solutions. Ideally, the formal, commercial housing sector produces a diverse range of commercial housing solutions (including land parcels) that respond to the price demands of all types of households, including the poor. However, historical experience demonstrates that the range of solutions is, in fact, very limited. The housing industry operates above both the capacity and the willingness to pay of the poor (this being one of the reasons why the poor house themselves).

Measures that contribute to lowering the average costs of housing production would then permit the poor, at the margin of the formal housing markets, to jump the frontier of formality to be served by a supply of low-cost formal, finished housing units. Such an approach seems to make sense in highly urbanized, middle income countries with few extremely poor citizens. Chile has lead the world in taking this approach with a consistent, long-term, and successful formal housing program which was, more recently, complemented by a set of programs directed to the informal sector.

Slum and squatter upgrading. These are measures oriented to the improvement of existing informal settlements, the so-called upgrading of slums or urban areas. They consist of a number of initiatives aimed at correcting negative externalities in these settlements, planning their future growth, providing urban services, rectifying and/or providing property titles, and providing technical assistance and micro-credit to improve individual housing units. The frontier of slum upgrading practice in many countries lies on the methods and means through which investment and operation costs are to be recovered, communities are to be involved in the upgrading process and governments are to finance these actions. Decentralization of responsibilities and revenues to local governments have played an important role in making Brazilian municipalities—with little support from the central government—become an important innovator in terms of slum and squatter upgrading, with hundreds of small and large experiences being attempted by municipalities all over the country. Two of the world’s largest metropolitan area programs of upgrading are currently being implemented in Brazil: the frequently cited Favela-Bairro, in Rio de Janeiro, and the Recife Pro-Metropole.

Land policies to promote the access of land to the poor. Land is the initial step in the gradual process of self-production of housing. The means by which it is developed or partitioned and, then, acquired, whether legally or illegally, has profound consequences for city development in years to come. In most developing cities, the poor locate either by squatting in public or private land, or buying land plots in informal subdivisions at the periphery, as seen in most of Latin America; by negotiating fractions of lots that are subdivided increasingly, as seen in much of Asia; by buying second (or third) story roof slabs in existing slums, as again seen in the large cities of Latin America; and by making use of various governmental programs of provision of access to land, among them the classical sites-and-services projects.

All of the above have consequences, both at the level of the individual families as well as at the level of the city, which are not completely understood. This makes the proposing of land policies particularly difficult. However, in general one would think that the overall desirable policy goal would be to increase the supply of affordable land with minimum negative structural consequences for city development. And to do this one would have to resort to the appropriate use of regulation, land taxation, and local governmental investments. To begin with, this would rule out invasions and squatting as unacceptable. It would also suggest that governments should be more lenient with informal land subdivisions, reducing standards and requirements of installation of infrastructure accepted here, as well as, the principle of gradual housing and urban improvement. In such a context, there seems to be ample possibility of negotiation with local developers, in order to avoid, via land readjustment practices the worst consequences of this type of development, such as the coordination of main road layout. A similar type of reasoning can be applied to cases mentioned above. Finally, one should say that the current ethos is not sympathetic to making use of governmental programs, and few are indeed found that are exemplar. 

Land policies is an area in which much and urgent research is needed in order to better clarify important issues. The following are of particular interest: (i) urban and land regulation; (ii) expansion of trunk infrastructure; (iii) the concession of financing and subsidies to land purchase and cost recovery of governmental programs; (iv) land taxation; and (v) land titling. There are important examples of such research led by the World Bank in both India and Brazil.