Inclusive Cities – South Africa

Photo: inclusivecities.ning.com – The Challenge

Through the South African national government’s subsidized housing delivery program, roughly 2.3 million households have been accommodated since 1994. Under the auspices of the Financial Sector Charter, the four major banks invested R44.8billion in providing more affordable housing. However, despite these achievements, the total housing deficit has not improved significantly, and an estimated 2.1 million households in South Africa live in shacks, either in informal settlements or in the backyards of formal housing.

In 2004 the then Minister of Housing, Ms Lindiwe Sisulu, introduced two significant policy initiatives. The first, Breaking New Ground is a ‘[national] comprehensive plan for the development of sustainable human settlements’, known as The Comprehensive Plan. A key element of the plan is a commitment to have tackled the question of informal settlement upgrading by 2014. Within the framework of this comprehensive national plan the government also finalized the second significant policy initiative, a thorough and wide-ranging policy on the ‘upgrading of informal settlements’.