Self-Help Housing

Self –Help
There seems to be a general agreement that self-help housing can be distinguished as the process by which communities that cannot access housing through conventional methods or formally, establishing themselves through the use of local resources and local skill base (see Turner, 1976; Ward 1982; Marias 1999; Pattison 2011). According to Turner (1976) self-help is a process through which the lower income households get access to housing. The key attribute of self-help housing is that it improves over time based on a person’s rising income and security (Davis, 2006). Self-help housing in this regard, can then be generally described as an incremental and affordable housing consolidation method for low income earning people who do not

It is evident in literature, that in most instances, the proliferation of the self-help housing paradigm has been a consequence of government’s inability to meet the housing needs of majority of its citizens (Harms, 1982; Bond, 2000; Gyger ,2013). Most self-help housing policies internationally have been influenced by neo-liberal policy positions of the World Bank and UN-Habitat and by other international, bilateral and regional development agencies and donors influenced by John Turner’s work in the 1970s (Bond, 2000; Omenya, 2006; Ntema, 2011; Bangdome-Dery, 2014). The main consensus around the idea of the neo-liberal position was to reduce the state’s role in the provision of housing. In the same way self-help housing policies were introduced in Sub- Saharan African developing countries such as Ghana and Botswana in the late 1970s through a neo-liberal approach (Horatio and Branko, 2007 and Omenya,

South African Housing White Paper (1994) makes out that adequate housing should be recognized as part of basic human right. The Housing White Paper also recognizes that people earning less than R3500 per month are eligible beneficiaries of some form of housing subsidy assistance. The 65 percent of low income earning household of Adams Mission are therefore entitled to receive the aforementioned subsidy assistance. Over the years, the low income earning residents of Adams Mission have used their own means to provide their own housing through unaided self-help housing and going as far as achieving a substantial level of housing consolidation without any form of housing subsidy