* BULLETIN : 5

This bulletin provides brief summaries of activities involving some of the SDI affiliates in Southern Africa, It is by no means comprehensive. Even those initiatives that are profiled are only covered superficially.

Zimbabwe: The Zimbabwe Government is going ahead with the eviction of over 1000 families who live at Porta Farm. This farm, which is some distance from the Harare city centre, was turned into an emergency holding camp in the early 1990s when squatters were evicted from privately owned peri-urban land. Zimbabwe Dialogue on Shelter and the Federation (Zihopfe) are playing an important part in the re-location plans, insisting that people identify and accept any alternative that is provided. They are also planning to proceed immediately with the construction of basic and affordable housing units once the relocation has begun.

In Mutare Zihopfe has finally been given permission to locate to the land that the state has already given them. A remaining precondition is the prior provision of water and sanitation. These delays are very costly in a country where inflation runs at over 600% per annum. In order to counteract this threat to affordability, they are buying and storing building materials while land and service issues are being resolved.

The Mbare Federation in Harare is building Federation-style community toilets at the Harare informal market. This means the Zimbabwe Federation joins the South Africans, Kenyans, Ugandans, Indians and Sri Lankans in building community toilets as well as houses.

Zimbabwe Dialogue will be facing new challenges as the new draconian NGO laws come into effect.

South Africa. uTshani Fund will receive its first major payment from the Gauteng Housing Board this month. Thanks to excellent commitment and perseverance the first R1 million of the more than R14 million owed to uTshani for Federation houses is to be paid out. Similar deals are close to finalisation in uTshani Fund. The fact that these two provinces are showing the lead can be ascribed, in large part, to the work put in by Sandra, inland coordinator for uTshani, and her Federation teams in these two provinces. In the case of Guateng it also demonstrates that the Federation has adapted to new conditions. From 1995 to 2000 the Federation pre-financed subsidies without water-tight agreements in place with local or provincial authorities. The reasons for this have been outlined in detail in many articles written by the SA alliance. By 2000 it became clear that past strategies were no longer effective and that new ones needed to be designed.

The subsidy chase by the Gauteng team has been an excellent example of these new strategies being developed in practice. In a nutshell these new practices have seen a shift from extracting populist promises from politicians to working out and tying down deals and contracts with officials. A similar strategy was developed in Mpumalanga, although the amounts involved were smaller, and Federation involvement less direct. Similar steps have been taken in Western Cape and Free State, although to date without any payments being made. Similar practical approaches are developing slowly in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu Natal at professional support level. Transfer of these capacities and skills to the Federation has been less intensive to date. In the North West the Federation has engaged actively around the subsidy chase issue but continues to use the tactics of the past. Horizontal learning is now needed and the Federation leaders need exposure to the way in which the Gauteng Federation and uTshani have been working and slowly succeeding with the new approach.

While these important developments are taking place, relationships with government are steadily improving as interaction and dialogue restore mutual trust. In Durban the Metro is keen to see the Federation build all houses in Ama-oti, a very large upgrading project that will involve over 15,000 households. The Johannesburg Metro is asking the Federation to work with it to build all PHP houses. In order to meet these new challenges the Federations in the two cities are returning to the process of developing and training construction collectives (made up mainly of women) to build these houses. In situations where the Federation is offered or is able to secure agreements to build houses at scale, especially at entire settlement level, then People’s Dialogue and the leadership of the Federation will take the communities concerned through intensive house modeling and costing exercises. Once prototypes have been finalized, with assistance from technical support professionals, then costs will be determined – hopefully at about half the going construction costs – and the women’s construction collectives as well as small contractors in the area will be encouraged to bid for all or part of the contract. The local communities and the Federation will oversee the development but all aspects of the contract will be managed by the contracting teams. Some conditions will apply. People will be given a self-build option – to be managed by the Federation – or the option to have their homes built by the construction collectives. Secondly a levy will be charged on all Federation built houses (either contract or self-build). This levy will go to the Federation for its running costs and for a self-insurance fund.

The Durban Federation has identified 10 collectives already.

Namibia. The Namibia Federation is facing a break away by one of its older groups – Habitat II in Windhoek. The Zimbabwean and South African alliance partners will help the Namibians address this issue. The South Africans, especially, have had experience with this kind of potential fragmentation. In the meantime the Namibians continue to build houses in several cities and towns. They have been approached to visit Angola to start savings groups in Luanda. It is also hoped that they will return to Swaziland to help revive the process there.

The Namibia alliance held a major national review from August 10 to 14. The Zimbabweans and South Africans participated. Once a report has been received, it will be circulated and posted on the SDI website.

The key issue here is of great relevance to the African Federations. This is the issue of loan repayment. The experience in Namibia is a reflection in miniature of the challenges faced in the past by the South Africans. They give further proof of the fact that housing for the poor needs to be housing without debt. The challenge, of course, is how do very poor people access housing, in an environment where there are no subsidies, if they do not have access to credit? In these situations (and in situations such as SA where subsidies never conform to the level of need) credit is an unavoidable instrument. The experience in SA and now in Namibia indicates very strongly that there is little wisdom in shifting the risks associated in housing provision away from the state and the market and imposing it fairly and squarely in the shoulders of individual families. This is where savings schemes and Federations come in – to spread the risk.

How is this done? First by the Federations having a clear redistributive agenda. Much of their energies must go into extracting entitlements from the state, from northern agencies and (in the form of surplus through cross subsidies) from the market. Second the savings schemes have the challenge of enabling poor people to absorb part of the risk and part of the debt (not all of it!) and of managing this risk and this debt in ways that minimize the burden placed on precarious livelihoods and in ways that increase the capacities of the members in terms of skills and capital. Third the Federations have to manage their Urban Poor Funds in creative ways – through setting up self-insurance funds, endowments funds and guarantee funds and through strategic investments and systems of cross subsidy. (This is where the SA process has been over the past two years.)

The real issue is that in SA in the late 1990’s and now in Namibia the Funds, Federations and savings schemes have been seeking to address this complex issue in a very reductionist fashion. Taking the Namibia case on its own, since the SA situation has the added dimension of the state subsidy, the following tentative observations can be made.

1) The burden for bridging the finance gap came to rest primarily on the shoulders least capable of carrying it – the poor households themselves.
2) When repayments inevitably declined the reaction was to find the solution only through additional effort and pressure to extract repayments from the communities. This led to greater tensions and only sporadic upturns in repayments.
3) This exposed the fact that a) the Fund is not yet devising innovative ways to absorb much of this risk b) the savings schemes were under such pressure because the risk was placed only on the shoulders of the members that their response was uni-dimensional – ie the application of more effort and energy to push up repayments and c) the alliance as a whole is still to develop redistributive strategies, besides securing donor funds and occasional grants from the state.

Finally it is critical to understand these challenges in terms of a context of ongoing learning. It is not that the Namibians have done wrong. Rather it is a case of them having done to date that which has been possible in light of where they are and in light of the options that have been open for them to explore. Now the time has come for them to begin to operate on a higher level. This is something they would not have been driven to do had they not been forced to first use the tools they have designed and then to find them wanting. Their own amazing capacity plus their links to international experience now equips them with a broader array of tools with which to address the bigger questions. These contradictions do not mean that the Namibian process has a chronic problem on its hands. (This was the analytical trap into which professionals led the SA process and from which they still struggle to escape). Rather it means that the process has evolved to the point where learning and the development of systems and procedures has been ratcheted up a number of notches. There is no doubt that the South Africans, in particular, welcome their arrival at this next stage.