Story by Wellington Makonese
Government is optimistic the nation will meet its housing target through public-private partnerships.
Local authorities, land developers and government ministries met in Harare this Monday to proffer solutions to housing delivery bottlenecks.
Government is seeking to integrate stakeholder contributions to meet the target of one million housing units by 2025.
“Housing delivery, as it is, is not a prison for the Ministry of Housing. It is a multi-stakeholder thing. Therefore, we saw it as necessary. After consulting the small groups there, we are now bringing all of them together. So that where we have consensus, we agree to move on. Where we still have problems, we are talking to each other because everyone is now present. Our job is to ensure that they are facilitated through the processes that are given. Remember, most of the developments are either done by the developer or by individuals. All we are saying is we need our financial sector to be back into this realm as it was then. We need to adjust to the fact that while we are in a formal economy, we need a formal, also accommodative financial sector throughout Zimbabwe. That’s what we need,” said Ministry of National Housing and Social Amenities Permanent Secretary, Engineer Theodious Chinyanga.
Hindrances that include financing and policy interpretation, among others, were brought to the fore.
“You are aware that we are promoting densification right now. It is one issue peculiar to it because we are densifying already existing settlements. There are those who are opposed to densification because they are chosen to be in low-density areas. There are questions about the carrying capacity of the infrastructure. There are also issues concerned with what we call contiguous local authorities. For instance, in Zimbabwe and Harare, where one local authority has the services. Harare has the water, has the sewer, and Zimbabwe has to obtain those from Harare. When it comes to the charges, the fees that are chargeable to the developers, all are true to Zimbabwe, one local authority, while the other is obliged and burdened on the supply and services for no return to it,” he added.
Housing delivery is one of the 14 pillars under the National Development Strategy One (NDS1) and government has been calling for private-public partnerships to ensure the success of the national goal.
