SHHA - Botswana's self-help housing agency: A success story, but is it sustainable?

Botswana's Self-Help Housing Agency is a success story in terms of achieving its goals, i.e. to provide an effective means of access to affordable housing for low-income groups and to upgrade the existing squatter settlements. This paper acknowledges the success of SHHA in the provision of housing units, but raises questions of sustainability of the program as well as that of the built environment. Given that the SHHA program is financed by Donor Agencies, the government should rake direct responsibility for housing the less-privileged in the same manner as does the Botswana Housing Corporation (BHC). Planning for social mix is not sustainable if only the standards of the facilities provided at SHHA are upgradable. While immediate finance available to the SHHA residences does not allow for elaborate development the infrastructure provided by government should be adequate to serve individual family efforts or infrastructure should be able to cope with incremental developments as they are being made by the families. Given the right preconditions, such as security of tenure, realistic building standards, and access to financial and technical resources, people in low-income groups could contribute substantially to own housing. However, the government's housing policies' definition of the housing problem is questionable. The main aim of these policies has been the eradication of a backlog of specific housing units. However, a definition of housing problems in purely numerical terms is too narrow. Therefore, the performance of housing policies and housing environments must be assessed by their influence on the quality of life in the broadest possible sense. Factors such as the influence of housing on the wealth of people for whom it is intended and on overall environmental quality must also be considered. Perhaps most important of all is the availability of meaningful choice in relation to different priorities coupled with the opportunity for people to play roles in deciding issues which directly affect their lives.