Episode 2 focuses on water, through an interview with Mathabo Makuta, national director of Habitat for Humanity Zambia.

The lack of clean water spreads diseases in Zambia

As Mathabo explains, inadequate access to clean and appropriate water supplies affects human health and economic development. In Zambia, for example, poor hygiene and limited access to clean drinking water cause diseases such as diarrhea and cholera, very common and potentially lethal.

The most affected are usually those living in the informal settlements, slums, around urban areas, as it happened with the cholera outbreak of 2017-2018, when almost 5,000 people were infected. When analysing the areas involved, 15 out of 20 resulted to be informal settlements outside of Lusaka.

70% of urban residents in Zambia live in slums

In Zambia, 60% of the population resides in rural areas, against the 40% living in cities. 70% of this last portion lives in informal settlements. Capital of the country and home to 2 million people, Lusaka is strongly affected by the water issue since its rapid urbanization led to the creation of slums all around it.

When it comes to water supply, many elements need to be taken into consideration, but two are crucial: the location of the sources and the affordability of the service.

Access to water is also a sexist issue

With regards to location, safety can be a challenge if the water source is not in a reasonable walking distance from the settlement. Women and girls – those who usually perform this task – get often assaulted, raped, and even killed on their way to go get it, especially late at night and early in the morning.

Also, in terms of school attendance, girls are the most vulnerable category. The lack of water in schools makes it impossible for them to take care of themselves during their period, so they often end up dropping out of school entirely in the long run.

For many, water is just too expensive

Affordability is still the main limit to provide clean water to everybody. The service needs to be paid for and poverty, together with the high unemployment rate – 11.41% as of November 2020,  makes it hard to afford for most of the population.

In addition to this, the COVID pandemic has worsened Zambian economic vulnerabilities. Kwacha, the local currency, depreciated 30% since the beginning of the year. A household of five people – the average household in Zambia and most sub-Saharan countries – would need a daily supply of approximately 20 litres, and each litre costs around 1 Kwacha (0,046 USD), which would make a total of 600 Kwacha per month, when the minimum salary is 1,520 Kwacha per month^[1].

These challenges are not limited to Zambia. The situation is similar in most African countries, especially Sub-Saharan ones. According to a 2018 Demographic and Health Survey, Zambia is taking control of the situation and slowly improving. In 2018, 72% of Zambian household had access to drinking water against 63% in 2014.

However, nearly half the population in rural areas remains without access to safe and clean water supplies. A slight improvement can be seen also in those areas, where 27% of the people has access to improved sanitation as compared to 20% in 2014.

Huge investment is needed to improve access

The involvement of institutions is another crucial point. In Zambia, for example, government is the sole provider of water, and there is a ministry of water which is responsible for adequate and clean portable water, sanitation and environment protection.

Unfortunately, the poor capacity of investment on improving the system and the inability to find alternative forms of funding and economical support, make the task particularly hard. Governments do not have the capacity to do it alone. Partnerships and collaborations with private companies are the only way to deliver what is needed and provide a proper service to everybody.

Because water is not only a physical, but also a social need. A home cannot be considered decent or complete if there is no clean water, and that is even more true during the COVID19 pandemic. Now more than ever, water can save lives and bring dignity to people’s lives.

Home Sapiens podcast was produced as a part of the Build Solid Ground Project, founded by the European Union, Habitat for Humanity. Its content is the sole responsibility of Habitat for Humanity and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union

[1] http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=242&loctype=1

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Throughout Africa, exciting initiatives are catalyzing actors and solutions to reach impact. There are important lessons to learn. Habitat’s Compendium of Best Practices for Housing in Africa, produced by the EU-funded Build Solid Ground project, documents positive stories of change in the areas of adequate and affordable housing, including basic services, land tenure and slum upgrading.

The priorities, interventions and policy recommendations in the compendium are aligned with the global commitments of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, the New Urban Agenda and with the recent commitments and priorities of the European Union and Africa and their partnership agreements.

This compendium presents 19 best practice cases from innovative experiences in 11 countries, covering flagship projects, contributions and collaborations from Habitat for Humanity, Cities Alliances, Slum Dwellers International, UN-HABITAT and their numerous local and international partners. These stories clarify the context, actors, steps taken, results, impact and lessons learned. They illustrate innovations and cutting-edge practical applications while demonstrating effective practices that can be replicated and scaled.

To launch this publication, Habitat for Humanity Europe, Middle East and Africa is hosting a series of webinars on the new EU-Africa partnership. Esteemed speakers and panelists will discuss how housing can contribute to sustainable growth, jobs and innovation in Africa. They will present policy suggestions and recommendations to ensure sustainable development.  

The period 2020/2021 is also pivotal to redefine Africa-EU relations, a partnership that has been reinforced in recent decades. Throughout the different phases of this alliance, the need for enhanced cooperation and coherence has been increasingly recognised and aid has been gradually dropped as a primary objective. Habitat for Humanity launches a policy paper on the matter of relevance of the housing and urban renewal sector in the EU-Africa partnership. 

Publications were produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their contents are the sole responsibility of Habitat for Humanity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

As a part of the Build Solid Ground project, supported by the European Union, Habitat for Humanity created a podcast series on housing issues around the world: Home Sapiens.

Episode 1 - the first of five episodes in season one – is an interview with Esben Neander Kristensen, Director at Gehl. He talks to Katerina Bezgachina, who heads communications for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Habitat for Humanity, about housing, home, people and their communities and cities.

The starting point for the interview is the difference between home and housing, a pivotal one according to Esben. While the latter is mostly related to functional needs, the former has a lot more to do with social interactions: with family and neighbours and, more in general, the community and the whole city.

One cannot live properly without the other, at least not in Gehl’s work, which focuses on a holistic perspective to make sure that the individual not only has basic needs met but can also connect with the rest of the community.

We could say that civilization started when people started created buildings and shelters, and they change as our communities and society do so. The challenges are the same all around the world: in many cases, all architects recognize the same issues and, sometimes, also the solutions to those issues.

Why is it key to address affordable housing?

When it comes to housing, according to Esben, ensuring that authorities build an adequate home for their population is actually a lot cheaper in the long run than not providing any.

It is an important goal, as is the need to provide true homes – not houses disconnected from their communities – for everyone, which often is more complicated than many expect. As a matter of fact, in many countries, despite the success in delivering housing, it has been much harder to create real homes for families and communities.

If you build affordable housing in locations that lack the most basic services and infrastructure, you are creating a situation in which they will never turn into a home. Urbanizing areas that have no jobs, transportation, schools and utilities nearby means turning them almost surely into abandoned territories: in some Latin American countries, up to 70% of new buildings destined for social housing become abandoned.

But then, how do you build useful affordable housing? What are the key components that make it successful?

Apart from making sure that basic needs are met – which sits at the core – additional layers must be added, with the idea of creating a place that can be both:

• A place of retracting, if you need to
• And of interacting with the world around you.

If we think about the lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, balconies where a pivotal element to guarantee communication and interaction between people, despite many limitations. Social interactions are crucial for humans, and that must be taken into account when building a house.

What is exactly this “sustainability” everybody talks about?

Regarding the urbanization of developing countries, a lot has to do with economics and politics. However, there is an important role for the architect when it comes to sustainability, especially the local aspect. Basic services are of course central to communities, but they can also be found in places that could be counterproductive; so, the architect has the responsibility to be smart about the location, especially when dealing with larger cities.

When talking about housing, sustainability has many different levels:

1. Technical sustainability, connected to the performance of all the buildings components, especially in terms of energy.
2. Local adaptation or fitness, understanding where you can make the most impact, which is not the same everywhere.

If, for example, wasting less energy can be crucial in Northern Europe, in warmer climates such as Latin America, Africa or South East Asia there might be other levels of sustainability where you can make a bigger impact, for example, keeping rooms cool to enhance productivity and comfort. This could save a lot of money and greenhouse gases from air conditioning costs too.

That’s why location and land use are so important. This is something that everybody keeps forgetting: in many cases, there are already buildings located in an ideal place in terms of connections, so it would be a great to reuse them. As Esben puts it, to be “smarter about the square meters that we have already built”.

What should be kept in mind is that home is a place where you get the chance to disconnect from the world and at the same time connect to other things around you.

Now, after a pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, we understood a lot more about the link between us and our homes and from that we should start to improve the quality of living for all humans across the globe.

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Even as COVID-19 significantly impacted Habitat’s ability to build at full capacity — and likely will continue to do so in many locations well into 2021 — we still have seen great progress and positive results. In fiscal year 2020, we helped more than 5.9 million people build or improve a place to call home, and through training and advocacy, an additional 9.9 million gained the potential to improve their housing conditions.

Annual Report 2020 online

BRATISLAVA (Oct. 5, 2020) – Emerging economies struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic may be significantly underestimating how much their housing sectors contribute to gross domestic product (GDP) and, as a result, missing opportunities for economic and social revival, according to a report released by Habitat for Humanity to mark World Habitat Day.

Existing datasets in low- to middle-income countries are often incomplete or inaccurate, and efforts to measure housing’s contribution to the economy have largely focused on developed countries, according to the report commissioned by Habitat’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter and co-authored by Arthur Acolin, assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington, and Marja Hoek-Smit, director of the International Housing Finance Program of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center.

But including the often-overlooked housing services and informal housing components reveals housing to account for up to 16.1 percent of GDP on average across 11 emerging economy countries analyzed in the report. That places housing on par with sectors such as manufacturing that often draw far more attention in economic recovery plans. In the Philippines, assuming official statistics count half the informal housing market — whereby families improve homes via an incremental process — housing’s actual share of GDP is 17.3 percent, the report found.

Inclusive financial interventions in the housing sector, particularly through construction or rental assistance, can stimulate economies in these countries while also improving the wellbeing of families through healthier housing conditions, according to the report, titled Cornerstone of Recovery: How Housing Can Help Emerging Market Economies Rebound from COVID-19.

“Look beyond the blind spots in the data and you see that housing can make or break a recovery,” said Patrick Kelley, vice president of the Terwilliger Center. “Investments in healthy, secure housing have greater-than-expected benefits, creating jobs, generating incomes and, critically, helping alleviate the overcrowding that makes communities more vulnerable to threats such as COVID-19.”  

The authors recommend stimulus policies that, in cooperation with the international and private sectors, focus on middle- and lower- income families while also including formal and informal markets, rental housing, and community organizations. They emphasize short-term actions to: make good land available for housing; open access to finance for developers, households and landlords; provide equitable subsidies to households; and offer incentives to lenders and builders. 

The report is the subject of a live panel discussion titled “+You: Is housing the secret to economic recovery from COVID-19?” The World Habitat Day panel includes Kelley and Hoek-Smit and can be viewed at www.habitat.ngo/economicrecovery.