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The programme aims to educate senior management officials from around the world in all aspects of housing finance: institutional, policy, financial and managerial.

The course covers housing-market developments, government policies, global trends in housing finance, housing-finance systems, lending and funding models, mortgage-finance instruments, innovations in loan origination and administration, the fallout from the sub-prime crisis and lessons in emerging markets, mortgage insurance, microfinance and rental housing

To date, more than 1,500 executives from at least 70 countries have attended the programme.

This is what I observed when I went for the programme.

As far as international participants go, the housing and financial meltdown in the United States and its fallout remains an issue of interest.

Financial crisis, we learnt, evolves from incentives to assume excessive insolvency exposure.

When a financial institution assumes such an exposure, it often leads to a deposit run, closure, losses, run on similar financial institutions, illiquidity and contraction of the capital-reserve base.

Property rights and registration, land and development regulations, development finance, infrastructure services, construction industry and end-user finance are all linked,

proving a challenge for many economies.

The importance of housing finance is illustrated by the fact that mortgage debt as a proportion of gross domestic product is growing in many developed and emerging markets.

While the majority of new households in developing nations have little access to the housing market, Thailand's Government Housing Bank is cited as a housing-finance success story.

Mortgage insurance, long established in countries such as the US and Australia, is slowly becoming a global trend.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines already offer it and India and Thailand will soon introduce it. Mortgage insurance is being seen as a vehicle to reduce obstacles to home-ownership as it allows lenders to approve mortgage loans with smaller down payments, making homes more affordabe for first-time buyers.

Reaching out to low-income home-buyers is a prudent social policy for governments and a sure bet for building a stronger economy.

There are also lessons to be drawn from the US housing mess and other past financial crises.

Learning and knowledge exchange among countries will improve and expand housing-finance horizons. It will also help broaden the perspectives for policy reforms in many nations.

This will hopefully encourage  prudence when it comes to housing-finance and risk management.