By Staff writer
The critical housing situation in the country has made housing a luxury for many Namibians.
At least 16% of the population live in shacks or improvised housing units. Statistics from the Namibia Statistics Agency show that about 336 000 Namibians have been condemned to live in corrugated iron-sheet shack dwellings.
Namibia faces a housing crisis and needs some half a million new homes but 90% of Namibian households would not qualify for a mortgage to buy them. The problem is chronically mismanaged housing market economics, debt, muted income growth and reliance on cash lending. For now, these exclude most Namibians from home ownership.
In turn, this undermines the country’s growing economy and fuels social tension; shanty towns and shacks fly up at four times the rate of brick houses.
Namibia is the second most unequal country in the world, according to the World Bank GINI Index.
The same index shows that Namibia’s CO2 emissions have doubled since 1991, underlining the need for more sustainable housing solutions.
But it is not all gloom and doom for the lowest income earners who are hardest hit by the housing shortage.
Last Wednesday, an innovative project which aims to tackle an urgent housing crisis in Namibia has won a prestigious Bronze World Habitat Award.
The Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia and the Namibia Housing Action Group has won the award thanks to its work to help communities in the country – where the majority of the country’s urban population live in informal settlements with little or no access to basic services and no land rights.
The SDFN/NHAG is community-based networks of housing saving schemes, aiming to improve the living conditions of urban and rural poor living in shacks, rented rooms and those without accommodation, while promoting women’s participation. The organisation work with people to formalise land ownership, meet infrastructure needs and access funds to upgrade homes or build new ones.
The World Habitat Awards, which are organised by World Habitat in partnership with UN-Habitat, are the world’s leading housing awards, which recognise and highlight innovative, outstanding and revolutionary housing ideas, projects and programmes from across the world.
The award-winning Community-Driven Housing and Informal Settlement Upgrading scheme, which is run by Namibia Housing Action Group and the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia, is based on partnerships with the government and municipal authorities.
Following Namibia gaining independence in 1990, the country experienced massive migration from rural to urban areas, where a lack of housing and infrastructure development led to the rapid unplanned growth across its major towns and cities.
A total of 89% of Namibians do not qualify for conventional home loans and cannot access commercial housing. As a result, 12 000 new informal homes are built each year.
However, the task of formalising and upgrading these settlements is huge in scale and too big for the government to tackle alone.
Since its inception in 2013, the scheme has been applied in 20 urban centres and 31 informal settlements, in 10 of Namibia’s 14 regions, making it one of the largest projects of its kind in the country.
In total, 3 873 homes have already been built or improved with water and sanitation services during the last 10 years, directly benefiting 25 000 people.
As part of the project, a survey of the settlement, which looks into where roads, communal areas and water and sanitation facilities could be placed, is carried out – and from this, a settlement plan is drawn up and submitted to the local authority for approval.
This can include using the Flexible Land Tenure Act 2012 to provide security of tenure to people living in informal settlements.
The Namibia Housing Action Group set up a community development fund which provides loans to members of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia’s savings groups for land acquisition, servicing of land, house upgrading and construction. The fund receives contributions from government, the private sector, external funders and savings group members.
The ongoing project plans to expand further within the country by upgrading 34 000 homes in the next three years.
NHAF’s Information officer Hendrina Shuunyuni told The Villager that winning the award is an incredible achievement of which her group is very proud and reaffirms they are leaders in this space.
Shuunyuni added that the award will have a life-changing impacts for the vulnerable homeless and inspire them to work harder to help and empower the poor by giving them affordable and safe homes.
She said NHAG and the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia are looking forward to scale-up informal settlement upgrading as well as house construction.
“The plan is to construct 1 117 houses in 37 urban areas in 2023. Furthermore, upgrading with earth works, water and sewerage is planned in nine informal settlements and a green fields site is planned to reach 8 626 households.”
David Ireland, Chief Executive of World Habitat, said: “This project is successfully responding to the urgent need to address the informal settlement crisis in Namibia. With the revolving fund, the project has developed a sustainable and scalable model that relieves the burden and expense on public authorities which do not have the capacity to tackle the issue alone.
“Too many communities have experienced slum upgrading in a top-down approach, so it’s fantastic to see people in the Community-Driven Housing and Informal Settlement Upgrading project in Namibia have taken control of the system themselves. They carried out their own planning, borrowed their own money and transformed their neighbourhoods themselves.”
A new study of the housing crisis in Namibia by the Integrated Land Management Institute (ILMI) suggests that market economics is at the heart of the housing problem. The question is: how does the country solve this problem?
The study further shows that over 90% of Namibian households would not qualify for a mortgage from any commercial bank and suggests the way to overcome the housing crisis is by simply allocating serviced land to the poor to build their own homes.
The World Habitat Awards recognise and highlight innovative, outstanding and sometimes revolutionary housing ideas, projects and programmes from across the world. More than 250 outstanding World Habitat Awards projects have been recognised over the years, demonstrating substantial, lasting improvements in living conditions. Each year two winners receive £10,000 (N$270 000) each and a trophy, presented at a global UN-Habitat event.
