Paper long abstract

For many decades now most African states have been challenged with rapid urbanisation rates fuelled by rural-urban migration processes and natural population growth at the same time, resulting in millions of people living in precarious housing conditions. The ongoing massive, quantitative as well as qualitative housing crisis has long-term negative consequences both for the people directly affected and for societal development processes in general.

Adequate housing is an elementary basic need. Therefore, the right to adequate housing and shelter had been embodied in the Human Rights Declaration of the United Nations of 1948, and was confirmed again in the Habitat Agenda 1996. Besides its mere protective function housing fulfils a socio-cultural function and reflects the expression of everyday life, comfort and aesthetics on individual and group level. Although the quality of a dwelling can be described by objective indicators, the same material and immaterial conditions can be evaluated completely different through the filter of subjectively and culturally varying perception models and underlying individual needs and demands.

The paper will raise two major questions concerned with adequacy:

1. How do people want to live? What housing for whom?

2. How can people get there? Which programmes are available to support urban marginal groups in their struggle for better housing?

Following the conceptual discussion, both questions shall be exemplified in two more presentations of this panel.

Paper long abstract

This paper will put the question of adequacy through cultural acceptability in the Ethiopian context. Therefore it will try to expose how the majority of the citizens of the rapidly growing capital Addis Ababa want to live. Condensed from an extensive participatory study, the presentation will highlight the bottom-up definition of ‘adequate’ housing and will argue for the consideration of the particular culture. First the population of Addis Ababa will be characterized socio-economically as well as referring to their self-perception as ‘modern’ and ‘urban’. In a second step the potential beneficiaries’ target shall be demonstrated by elaborating what features of their dwellings they want, do not want, and what they just don’t need. These findings will be contrasted with the actual main strategy in Addis Ababa, the construction of multi-storey, privately owned condominium apartment houses. Condominium housing is regarded as a chance to meet the highly increasing demand for accommodation units in African cities due to rapid urbanisation, and might even retard the urban sprawl. Deriving from the comparison of what people want and what they actually have as an option, the construction of condominiums on a large scale will be examined critically, and the question will be put up for discussion, whether living in owner-occupied apartments creates a new African urban culture.

Paper long abstract

In order to finance housing in Africa different approaches like subsidised public housing schemes, conventional mortgage loans or projects financed by international donors or NGOs, to name just a few, have been put up. So far, however, the magnitude of such efforts in Africa has been very limited. Microfinance for housing has developed to the dominant approach in the last decades in many developing countries of Asia and Latin America, while in Africa this concept is still in its infancy but highly propagated in order to upscale the quantitative output. However, considerable shortcomings of this approach are already obvious like the exclusion of tenants or the profit generation of banks out of the incomes of urban marginal groups.

Hence, so far vast majorities of urban residents in Africa have financed their shelter either by private savings or by relying on informal credits mostly provided by family members or friends.

In Dar es Salaam the recent city-wide programme to “Upgrade all Informal Settlements” aims to combine microfinance for housing with activities of infrastructure upgrading and land titling. Main target groups are low-income households, but whether these are willing or even able to invest parts of their limited income in housing and thus, whether housing microfinance is perceived as an adequate measure by the target groups will also be explored.