Urban slums Could overwhelm Africa -Bhc

FREDERICK KEBADIRETSE
Staff Writer | Monday September 27, 2010 00:00

 

This was one of the key issues that emerged from a training session at the African Union Housing Finance (AUHF) conference in Gaborone last week.

According to Thupa Thupa, of the Botswana Housing Corporation (BHC), statistics presented and analysed during the training revealed that despite a slight decrease in the number of emerging slums in Africa, populations in urban areas continue to increase at a fast rate.

Participants agreed that to facilitate affordability, housing should be treated as an incremental product rather than a wholesale product. They said provided rural-urban migration continues to prevail in many countries across the continent, housing will be a major problem, especially in urban areas.

The majority of the people in urban areas cannot get financing to build or buy houses, let alone land, and end up resorting to slums for shelter. The participants said regulations should be loosened to make affordable housing finance accessible to the masses.

The Chairperson of AUHF, Reginald Motswaiso, said rapid urbanisation could also be an opportunity for housing finance as demand for housing increases in urban centres, but this can only be possible with an accommodating regulatory framework in place.

He said other opportunities for housing finance in Africa are growth in the property market as well as Africa's relatively young population that will seek its own housing in the future. Speaking at the same conference, Simon Walley of the World Bank said the housing finance market in Africa was not hit hard by the recent economic crisis as the market is still small compared to other parts of the world. He said there is no toxic sub-prime lending in Africa as most loans are done on a conservative basis. 

Presenting on Housing Finance in Botswana, the Head of Consumer Banking at Standard Chartered Bank Botswana (SCBB), Dr Michael Wiegand, said Botswana is still low in terms of the commercial property market, with mortgages at 2.5 percent of GDP.

Wiegand said banks are willing to lend money provided there is assurance that the amount will be recovered.However, banks find it difficult to recover their money if individuals fail to pay because it is often hard to sell repossessed properties locally. The conference was held under the theme Building Towards A Boom: African Housing Market Finance In 2010. Standard Chartered Bank was one of the sponsors of the conference.