* DOCUMENT : 5

SOUTH AFRICA

The South African Homeless People's Federation, which originated in 1991, is a formalised network of autonomous community-based organisations, each with their own identities and decision-making structures. Most affiliated organisations in the Federation operate in broadly similar ways, but they all have their own internal rules. Nevertheless, these organisations are united by a common development approach, which has the following characteristics

* All member organisations are rooted in shack settlements, backyard shacks or hostels.
* All organisations are involved in savings and credit, managed at grassroots level by the members themselves
* Whilst men are not excluded, the vast majority of Federation members are women.
* All organisations are involved in struggles for security of land tenure and affordable housing.

As in the Indian example, saving is the central activity of Federation groups. Members have to belong to one of the Housing Savings Schemes, and they have to save small amounts of money on a daily basis. Daily savings (NsukuZonke) strengthen bonds between members, ensure accountability and transparency and enable poor people to gain access to credit. Daily savings are used for crisis and income generation at local level.

A frequent comment from other more sceptical members of the community is that members can save little in comparison to the total cost of housing construction. In fact, the Federation perceives a much more complex relationship between savings and housing finance. They have no illusions that the savings will be adequate to construct houses, but emphasise the importance of saving for the following reasons:

* Savings mobilise poor people. 'We do not collect money, we collect people'.
* Savings ensure high levels of participation and mutual interaction in an organisation. Through investing their scarce finance, the members have a material stake in their organisation and in its planning and decision-making. Savings encourage regular interaction and enable strong bonds to be created. This results in the Schemes becoming reliable support systems for their members.
* Savings create a space for the central participation of women in informal settlements. This is because women are much more interested than men in saving for credit and for housing. As a result the Schemes make a material difference to the lives of most marginalised people in South African society: poor, homeless, women.
* Savings and loans enable community organisations to develop the capacity to manage and control finance and to demonstrate this ability to the outside world, eventually even accessing external finance.

The experience of saving, lending, and financial management provides a platform for acquisition of further development skills. The most important mechanisms to support this learning process are community-to-community exchanges of information, experience, and skill which are organised by the Federation. The training that takes place within these exchanges covers the spectrum of skills needed to consolidate community-managed housing and neighbourhood development. There are four main components to the training programme.

* Savings schemes learn in practise how to map and profile settlements, and gather basic socio-economic data about the residents. This is undertaken to develop an understanding of the living conditions of the people in the settlement.
* Within a financial component, members of the Housing Savings Schemes teach one another basic financial management, including bookkeeping and banking.
* A third component is the house-modelling process, whereby members collectively design and model the houses of their dreams, then consider issues of affordability and amend their designs accordingly.
* The fourth component, once housing loans have been obtained and an acceptable house design identified, is training in building and construction techniques.

One unique feature of the South African situation has been the window of opportunity provided by the recent election of the country's first democratic government. The various development ministries, long discredited under the apartheid system, were suddenly taken over (at senior levels) by politicians eager to address the country's badly skewed socio-economic development. These ministries have been much more accessible to people's organisations then ever before, and more so than is the case in any of the other countries represented in the Shack Dwellers International.

This has allowed the South African Homeless People's Federation to pursue a careful and sustained strategy of critical engagement with Government. The strategy has been to develop mechanisms for people-centred development - mobilisation and management of credit, information gathering, organisation building, house construction, loan repayment - and to then show government how these bottom-up activities ought to be supported.

While the post-apartheid government has constructed a discourse of people's empowerment and support for the poor, these ideological positions have lacked any material underpinnings either in the form of enabling legislation or the capacity and actual will to deliver. The Federation has understood that governments rarely respond to the needs of the poor unless the poor are organised and politically adept at putting pressure on them. The Federation has also understood that the capacity to impact positively on legislation and to influence the institutional arrangements which govern delivery would be of little value to the poor if they lacked the ability at grassroots level to harness and manage human and material resources for the purpose of development.

In South Africa's formal institutions, like everywhere else, there remains the assumption that people's organisations, especially squatter organisations, lack capacity, and that it is the job of external agents to either deliver products or to build capacity through guidance and training. The Federation seeks to shift policy and change the institutional mechanisms governing housing support by demonstrating that

* poor people are far more capable than government and other formal institutions are willing to recognise;
* capacity is built via direct everyday experience, not via abstract teaching by so-called experts;
* the real lack of capacity, which needs to be addressed urgently, is the capacity of officials, politicians, banks, planners and other professionals to understand and (with that understanding) to support a people's housing process.

Today the Federation enjoys significant moral support at National and Provincial level.

One area where the South African Federation has moved quickly ahead is in attracting development resources on the basis of its successes at grassroots level. Late in 1994 Joe Slovo, the late Minister of Housing, a popular and people-oriented veteran of the liberation struggle, agreed to make a grant of R10m (US$2,3m) to the Federation's emerging uTshani Fund. He had met with the Federation and was impressed with its work; he also realised that his Ministry's own housing policies were heavily biased towards formal private-sector delivery as a result of the political influence of big business. His offer quickly ran into trouble, however, when it became apparent that bureaucrats and financial controllers in the Housing Department did not share Slovo's enthusiasm for a people-driven process. This situation was complicated by Slovo's untimely passing in December 1994.

Using funds obtained from overseas donors, the Federation began making housing loans anyway. It carefully built up a track record of saving, loan management, and construction of incredibly low-cost, but quality housing. It proved that Federation members, using their own systems, could build houses for less than half the cost of the private sector. It then embarked on a campaign of publicising its efforts by inviting politicians, bureaucrats, and the press to see what it was doing. As word spread about the Federation's work, the tide turned against the obstructing bureaucrats, and the grant was finally put into effect in March 1994 - 17 months after it had been offered. Similar successes have been enjoyed in other areas, most notably in a recent agreement to channel state housing subsidies directly to the Federation through uTshani Fund.

The remarkable thing about this achievement is that it was built almost entirely on the basis of the successes of the ordinary Housing Savings Schemes themselves. By staying with their systems and resisting incorporation into externally-designed formal systems of management and accountability, the Federation demonstrated in practice that it could not only handle large-scale development finance, but could put it to more effective use than the private sector. The South African government has subsequently offered to increase its contribution to uTshani Fund.

Other Sources of Information

* Visit the South African Homeless People’s Federation Website, containing links to extensive documentation archives.
* eMail People's Dialogue at admin@utshani.org.za