Financing Sustainable Housing

Bathandwa Mbola (BuaNews)—The upcoming African Ministers of Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD) conference will focus on overcoming the financial and resource challenges for sustainable housing and urban development.

The second such conference will bring together African housing ministers and experts in the field between 28 and 30 July in Abuja, Nigeria. Head of the Conference Secretariat and Director-General of Housing, Itumeleng Kotsoane, said millions of the continent’s poor people were looking for better opportunities in cities and this created a serious human settlement problem as cities were not coping with the influx from rural areas. About 72 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population are slum dwellers.

Therefore AMCHUD was formed in 2005 in Durban to find sustainable solutions to Africa’s rising urbanisation and human settlements challenges. Housing Minister and outgoing Chairperson of the AMCHUD Lindiwe Sisulu is expected to give a report back to the conference on what AMCHUD has been able to achieve in its first four years of existence. The conference will also discuss how to strengthen the forum and secretariat to provide assistance as decisions of AMCHUD II are being implemented. With more than four million houses built in South Africa since 1994 and a target to eradicate informal settlements by 2014, South Africa will share as well as learn the successes and challenges with delegates from across the world.

Since 1996 the number of households has increased by approximately four million, and the Community Survey recorded just above 12.5 million households, according to recent government Development Indicators. To address challenges such as increasing cost as well as lack of spending capacity and poor monitoring in some provinces, the envisaged Housing Development Agency will help in consolidating and rationalising housing development functions and institutional arrangements. During the first conference it was agreed that there was a need for an enhanced framework that will seek to overcome the challenges of shelter and urbanization.

This taking into account the Millennium Development Goals, NEPAD and the World Summit on Sustainable Development’s Plan of Implementation. The previous conference also identified strategies for turning the urbanisation challenge into an opportunity for development, particularly by consolidating integrated approaches to urban development and outlining ways of managing the consequences of urbanisation. These would include among others the urbanisation of poverty through slums and informal settlements throughout Africa’s urban centres.

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