Urban Housing Provision in Botswana (original) (raw)
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Low-Income Access to Urban Land and Housing in Botswana
Urban Forum, 2012
Like most developing countries, Botswana-a middle-income countryhas experienced rapid urban growth, which has brought in its wake many social and economic problems. One of the key challenges has been the lack of access to land and housing for the poor who have moved into the urban centres in large numbers in search of employment and economic survival. Many programmes and strategies have been introduced by both central and local governments to address this problem. These include: squatter settlement upgrading; public housing through site, service and selfhelp housing; subsidised plot allocation; financial incentives for housing construction, etc. Many challenges have hampered the implementation of these strategies and programmes including fast urbanisation, which outstrips supply of land and housing for most urbanites; unaffordability of many of these schemes; poor targeting; high defaulting rates and poor management of these schemes. This paper calls upon the government, the private sector and local communities to devise holistic solutions to enable low-income households to procure decent accommodation in urban areas.
An evaluation of the self-help housing scheme in Botswana, case of Gaborone city
Spatium, 2007
Botswana like other developing countries faces a problem of acute shortage of housing, particularly for low-income urban families. The current housing problems are the outcomes of the economic, demographic and social changes which the country has experienced since independence in 1966. In particular the urbanization process which surfaced in the early 1980?s. The government has sought to cope with the problem of low-income urban housing by establishing a Self-Help Housing (SHHA) program in the main urban centers. The evaluation findings reveal that, on the whole, the impact of the SHHA approach on the improvement of low-income urban housing has been unsuccessful. The major problems of the scheme are lack of serviced land and inadequate finances for plot development. This has been exacerbated by the high urban development standards which are out of the reach of low-income urban families. The evaluation study also reveals that, there are some indications of non low-income urban househ...
2001
The housing problem in the urban centres of developing countries is not new. It was first acknowledged as a serious problem in the 1950'st when governments of most developing countries realised the scale and magnitude of the housing shortage. Although these governments have over the years developed various housing policies in their attempts to alleviate the situatio~ the problem persists. The ineffectiveness of these policies can be attributed to the numerous problems, which occurred during their successive implementation. These problems include inter alia, the lack of political will, persistent financial constraints with regards to budgets for housing, inappropriate housing policies, a shortage of skilled staff to implement the policies, and the lack of construction expertise in the field of housing. The aforementioned problems have resulted in governments of developing countries in general, and South Africa in particular, merely facilitating the delivery of low-income housing ...
Market solutions to the low-income housing challenge – a case study of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
2019
MARKET SOLUTIONS TO THE LOW-INCOME HOUSING CHALLENGE-A CASE STUDY OF BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE The provision of decent, affordable and well-located housing for low-income communities has been an intractable problem, especially for developing countries. The empirical puzzle that motivated this study is that, despite the adverse macro environment in Zimbabwe, there appears to be private-sector developers who are successfully developing housing benefiting the low-income group. This is so, despite numerous studies that claim that given the magnitude of the housing challenge, a neoliberal doxa in a developing country context as a solution is a fallacy. Working on the broad premise that these developments represent a successful adaptation to the structural environment, the main question guiding the study was-what accounts for the success of marketprovided low-income housing developments in Zimbabwe despite the environment not being conducive for it? The two sub-questions flowing from this main question were firstly, how does the structural environment enable and/or constrain private sector low-income developments in Zimbabwe? Secondly, what strategies do developers adopt in response to the structural enablers and/or constraints to develop low-income housing in Zimbabwe? From these questions, the study has two hypothesesthe first hypothesis is that despite the adverse environment there exists in Zimbabwe structural enablers that make market solutions to the low-income housing challenge possible. The second hypothesis states that developers have specific discernible strategies that they employ in response to the adverse operating environment to reduce development costs to levels that enable them to provide low-income housing successfully. Using the Structure-Agency model, which is a theoretical framework rooted in institutional economics, a conceptual model to study the development process was developed and used to theorise the impact of structure on agency in the development process. Empirical evidence was gathered using observation, household surveys, and semi-structured interviews. This evidence was obtained from five housing schemes, the local authority, central government, financiers and the developers of the housing schemes, and then processed using NVIVO and SPSS. The study finds that most challenges faced by developers emanate from the institutional environment and access to resources. These challenges are namely central-local government dynamics fuelled by political undertones, lack of access to land suitable for the target group, a bureaucratic and stiff regulatory framework as well as a lack of marketprovided developer and end-user finance. Enabling factors were mainly the withdrawal of the government in the provision of housing in line with World-Bank neoliberal orthodoxy and incapacitation of the local authority, which eliminated alternative sources of housing for the lowincome group other than market provided housing, thus widening the market base for the developers. Strategies used by the developers include developer provided finance to the target group, preselling developments, sidestepping the local authority through buying land at the periphery of the local authority boundary, sidestepping regulatory barriers through engaging in corruption, backward integration to promote efficient resource allocation, and an innovative approach to risk management that caters for the low-income group. The study concludes that all these strategies have one overriding objective of cost containment. The findings indicate that there is potential, appetite and scope for more private-sector engagement. On this basis, it is recommended that the key to unlocking this potential lies with the state, as there are several policy implications that flow from these findings if the highlighted constraints are to be addressed. The study makes a number of key contributions to knowledge on market solutions to the low-income housing challenge in the area of theory, methodology, policy and empirical data.
2021
A thorough examination of policies and guidelines tailored towards enabling access to land and housing in Gaborone suggests incongruences' inherent in these strategies. Besides, planners and policymakers' continuous oversight to recognise the complexities of the urban everyday survival strategies and the lived experiences of the populace needs to be investigated. Numerous interventions have been introduced to facilitate land and housing access for low-income households in Gaborone. Even so, restricted access to these assets remains an enormous task, proven complex and problematic to resolve. The empirical evidence specifies the predominant situation articulated by a clash of rationalities between policies and everyday socio-economic practices of access to land and housing by low income households in Gaborone. The investigation of these tensions between policies promoting access to land and housing and the advocacy of the Self-Help Housing Agency as the primary rationale for ...
Situational Analysis of Housing in the Greater Kumasi Sub-Region, Ghana
Prepared for the JICA Study Team as Part of the Comprehensive Urban Development Plan for Greater Kumasi Project
This report presents a situational analysis on housing for the Greater Kumasi Sub-Region (GKSR)—a newly designated functional region under Ghana’s new spatial planning system for the purposes of strategic spatial planning and sustainable growth management. The report was prepared to inform the formulation of the first Comprehensive Urban Development Plan for the Sub-region . The report has three main sections. Section one focuses on analysis of the housing situation in the GKSR based on statistical data released by the Ghana Statistical Services on official request by the project study team . Section two provides a description of the physical condition of housing in the Kumasi Metropolis based on seven main identifiable sectors of housing proposed by the author. The final section presents the findings of a short study conducted on the role of private real estate developers in housing supply within the GKSR.
Spatium, 2011
This article evaluates the effectiveness of the Integrated Poverty Alleviation and Housing Scheme (IPAHS) in Ramotswa; an urban village located 32 km south-east of the capital city of Botswana, Gaborone. This study emanates from the fact that low income urban and rural residents with no formal employment were left out of the Self Help Housing Scheme (SHHA). The SHHA was mandated to facilitate the acquisition of subsidised land and loan to purchase building materials. One of the major conditions to qualify for SHHA is that applicants should have formal employment.; the IPAHS was specifically introduced to facilitate economic empowerment to poor households who do not qualify under the SHHA scheme. The IPAHS scheme is a twothronged approach mandated to equip the residents with skills to build/improve houses for themselves and create employment for themselves through molding of bricks for sale in an effort to alleviate poverty. This paper is based on documentary and field research. The ...
Policies And Barriers in The Provision of Affordable Housing in Ghana
2015
Affordable housing is a major concern by both public and private players in the Construction Industry. This paper aimed at revealing the policies and barriers in the provision of affordable housing faced by both existing and potential developers in the construction industry. The objectives were to identify and evaluate the policies and barriers in the provision of affordable housing in the country. A quantitative survey approach was adopted for the study. Stratified random sampling technique was used in selecting respondents for contractors and real estate developers whiles purposive sampling technique was adopted for selecting consultants and clients. The sampling size of building contractors, real estate developers, consultants and clients used for the study were 38, 28, 21 and 15 respectively. 102 questionnaires were self-administered to respondents and 84 were retrieved for the analysis showing 82% response rate. The responses were analysed using simple statistical tools such as...