A housing model is being rolled out that will see affordable and integrated developmental cities developed around the continent. That’s the dream of Rali Mampeule, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the African Housing and Infrastructure Fund (AHIF).This is not a dream that exists in the clouds, this is a dream based on what this successful entrepreneur has already achieved with an innovative solution to a shortage of good-quality affordable housing.
As a result of this far-sighted vision, thousands of plots of land in South Africa now have family homes on them. And the dream is not limited to bricks and mortar either. Rali and his team have been cooperating with scientists and researchers to work on and develop the latest technology to fast-forward the process of developing and building homes.The essence of the model is that Rali and his team buy land and prepare it for development.
Given that in South Africa, many regional authorities were returning unused funding meant for the development of housing to the National Treasury, Rali set out to prise open that bottleneck of funding and development that was choking the delivery of housing.To deal with what he calls South Africa’s “two-million-unit housing crisis” Rali established the South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund (SAHIF) as a means of tackling the challenge of affordable housing in South Africa.
The African Housing and Infrastructure Fund, to be launched in 2023, is the continental vehicle for taking on the same challenge. Says Rali, “We thought we could come up with a plan to accelerate the delivery of affordable housing by buying land and getting it ready for development. Then we put it out on the market for people to buy.
As a young man working as an estate agent, Rali was able to observe the processes of land development at first hand. What he saw was a lack of understanding of the complexity of the process. “You don’t get a billion-rand today and tomorrow you can start building on the land,” he notes.
Read the full article here: Accelerating the delivery of affordable housing in Africa
