Windhoek has enough land to cater for low-cost housing: Matyayi

The Chief Executive Officer of the City of Windhoek, Moses Matyayi, has said that the City has sufficient land to support housing initiatives aimed at formalising informal settlements in the nation’s capital.

The Windhoek municipality, together with the National Housing Enterprise (NHE) and the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development, is implementing a pilot project to construct low-cost housing in the city’s informal settlements.

The Informal Settlement Upgrading Project (ISUP) was launched in August 2020 and enabled many low-income earners to acquire formal houses through the project.

Matyayi told Nampa on the sideline of a handover ceremony of 58 houses in the Greenwell Matongo informal settlement on Tuesday, that the ISUP project is one of the initiatives currently being implemented in the city to provide decent housing to people living in informal settlements.

“As we see right now, the land that we currently have will be adequate to cater for a larger portion of the residents in the informal settlements because they are already there. And all we are doing is upgrading or doing construction of services and housing,” he said.

He further noted that informal settlement formalisation and upgrading programmes “are intertwined because they start with first servicing the land, and then the top structure comes later after the land has been serviced. Of course, this initiative is being funded by Government through the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development. And we believe that the little movements that have been made so far will have a greater impact as we continue to have an incremental way of formalising the informal areas.”

NHE, which is the implementation agency of the ISUP, has already developed 652 houses under the project at a cost of N.dollars 124 million, according to the housing enterprise chairperson, Toska Sem.

Sem in her remarks at the handover said the houses were built and processed at a cost lower than N.dollars 200 000 per unit.

“In line with the NHE mandate, we are relentless in our drive to expedite the provision of quality and affordable structures for Namibians,” she said.

Plans are at an advanced stage to launch another new project in Windhoek to develop over 600 housing units in Otjomuise at an estimated cost of over N.dollars 150 million, she said.

(NAMPA)
AT/EK/PS
(NAMPA)