Chronicle EditorMunicipal Reporter
Harare City Council is relaxing building by-laws to make housing affordable. In an interview yesterday, corporate services and housing director Mrs Josephine Ncube said the city had come up with various strategies which will enable it to meet the target of 105 000 houses by 2018 set by Government under Zim-Asset.
“Our technical departments are looking at various building options.
“We want to come up with technologies which make houses more cost effective.
“For example we are looking at the use of burnt farm bricks on partitions on houses. These are part of ongoing efforts designed to allow more people to build their own houses,” she said.
Mrs Ncube said council was also looking at perfecting the manner in which cooperatives were being managed to make sure that finances are not used for administrative purposes.
“Cooperatives are now required to open dedicated accounts for development funds and the banks which we are going to bank with will be controlling the funds to make sure they are not withdrawn for administrative things but will only be released for example to pay service providers after approval had been given for that project by the city and the bank,” said Mrs Ncube.
“We are also looking at private public partnerships and we are in contact with quite a number of development partners who are going to be developing a number of housing units especially low cost housing.”
She said the majority of people on the city’s waiting list want low cost houses.
“We are also encouraging pay schemes where group of people come together, we open a bank account which the city and the members will control together.
“The money they put into the account is used to service the land after which people can then build for themselves.
“Usually, these schemes are for medium and high income earners,” he said.
Online Reporter