Bonginkosi Masiwa examines the shift in housing policy from one premised on government providing all, to people “doing it for themselves”, as highlighted at an Afesis-corplan seminar held in June 2007.

RAPID housing delivery in a country like South Africa, which faces huge housing backlogs, remains a major challenge.

Government efforts to provide decent housing for its citizens have fallen short of addressing the huge backlog in the desired short period of time. Nevertheless, government has attempted to create an enabling environment for housing delivery by putting in place policies and supportive programmes that are targeted at empowering communities to “do it themselves”.

One such community-initiated programme is the People’s Housing Process (PHP). The PHP was introduced in an attempt to use the resources available in communities to fast track housing delivery for the poor.

However, nationwide experiences have shown there is a need to completely overhaul the policy if the huge backlogs are going to be reduced. The poor performance of the PHP policy has been attributed to the policy being too restrictive and that it was conceived at top levels with insufficient consultation at grassroots level.

Over the past two years government has been seeking to review and improve the PHP.  While there have been some successes which can be drawn on, usually where government has played a minor role, such as the case of the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor  (FEDUP), housing initiatives in which communities have played a major role appear to have worked the best.

The experiences of FEDUP were examined during a recent organisation seminar and can be used as a case study showing that if NGOs and communities were left to do more for themselves, a lot more could be attained.

Fedup is an organisation involved in PHP projects in a number of provinces. It has developed a PHP model under which poor people are encouraged to save by reducing expenditure on luxuries and taking up extra odd jobs and placing their savings in a jointly owned savings account. FEDUP has a good working relationship with government from whom they have accessed funding for their housing projects.

Another way for communities to organise themselves and access funds, technical support and land for housing has been through housing development co-operatives that dovetail with the government’s PHP approach. 

The Development Action Group (DAG), a leading NGO based in the Western Cape, has helped to set up a professionally run housing savings organisation where members save for six months in order to qualify for a loan at a fair interest rate.

A housing policy where the community contributes towards their own housing has been a long time coming. It is hoped that the revised policy would not be too strictly defined but could include aspects of community involvement such as voluntary and/or discounted labour, savings, knowledge/skills, material/equipment, land and community projects such as crèches and communal gardening allotments.

The national Department of Housing revealed at the recent seminar it plans to move away from the PHP policy to what it terms the Community-Driven Housing Initiatives (CDHI). The seminar brought together a wide range of stakeholders and targeted roleplayers aimed at sharing experiences and making recommendations on how the PHP policy could be improved. 

Here the government wants to develop a housing framework which would allow communities and NGOs to use the policy as a guideline in building their houses. Civil society and communities hope that government will come up with a community-driven framework that is flexible enough to accommodate the diverse housing needs that exist in the country.

Different kinds of housing models have been developed by NGOs and CBOs in recent years and range from a district model developed in Cape Town to one that is not only targeted at merely building houses for the poor but also at eradicating poverty. Government envisages that the CDHI process would try to accommodate all types of housing initiatives which have developed countrywide under the PHP over the last few years. 

Here it is of paramount importance that whatever policy or programme the government settles on, it must have evolved from broad consultation in order to afford the people an opportunity to get involved in planning their own future development.  

Seminar participants agreed that government should develop a separate funding mechanism (over and above the housing subsidy) which communities would be able to access under the envisaged CDHI policy to strengthen their capacity to manage such programmes.  

At the same seminar, the Amathole District Municipality (ADM) also encouraged communities to participate in the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) processes, and register as stakeholders in IDP processes as these planning exercises were an important tool to co-ordinate all departments and spheres of government. In this regard, NGOs and CBOs dealing with housing needed to participate and influence plans at IDP reviews.

As a start, the Department of Housing plans to increase the annual delivery of housing from 250 000 units to 500 000 units. It is hoped that the new programme would provide a flexible framework within which a variety of different housing development approaches would be accommodated from various community roleplayers. 

Government should concentrate on monitoring to ensure that funds are used properly, houses are built according to plan and that communities are truly driving the process if the target is to be met.  Indeed there are no easy solutions to the nationwide housing crisis in the country. Communities need to get into the culture of organising and mobilising their savings and not wait for government to “provide”.

The Local Government Transformer August/September 2007