EDITORIAL: Expedite new measures to deliver affordable housing

DespiteGovernment efforts to facilitate affordable housing, it remains a dream for many citizens. Houses on the market are still out of reach for middle and low-income earners in terms of cost. Affordable housing is key, if the country’s Vision 2020 target to increase urbanization rate from 17 per cent of the population to 35 percent by the year 2020, is to be realized. A 2012 Housing Market Study in the City of Kigali showed that 340,000 new housing units are needed by 2022 and 86 per cent of these should be affordable houses. Meeting this target will depend on how fast the new measures to meet housing needs in the country are implemented. While addressing a post-cabinet press conference last week, Didier Sagashya, the Director General of Rwanda Housing Authority said the government had identified bottlenecks hindering the delivery of low-cost housing, and had devised new procedures to streamline the set targets within the housing sector. This is good news for many who still find the current houses on the market unaffordable. Among the challenges to be addressed to be able to deliver low-cost housing include; high cost of land, high cost of building materials, limited building technologies compared to other countries and high cost of financing, both for investors and property developers. Now that the bottlenecks have been identified, and measures identified to address them, the concerned stakeholders should move fast and implement them. Property developers who are key stake holders need support in terms of electricity, roads, water and sewerage and low interest rate finances to develop low cost houses. Since all this is addressed under the new measures that were approved by the cabinet meeting, what Rwandans expect is urgency in implementation. This will go a long way in ensuring that vision 2020 targets in housing are met.

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EDITORIAL: Expedite new measures to deliver affordable housing