Community Projects Award
Finalist: Built Environment Support Group’s Msunduzi Project
Niki Moore
The “little boxes” springing up in their thousands as part of the government’s low-cost housing masterplan are often a major headache for municipalities.?Services and maintenance are expensive and very often the residents can’t, or won’t, pay.
When services break down, the rows of identical houses become depressing hovels. An NGO in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, is tackling this downward spiral with a new approach to town maintenance.?
“Until now there have only been two ways in which municipal services have been delivered either through municipal staff or private companies. What we have developed is a programme whereby the communities themselves provide the services,” explains Riaz Jogiat, of the Built Environment Support Group (BESG).
“Not only have we created jobs, but we are able to deliver these services at a much lower cost.”
BESG was set up in 1982 by a handful of academics working in the faculty of architecture and allied disciplines at the Natal University in Durban.
“At that stage we were trying to encourage people who lived in townships to take a pride in their surroundings,” says Jogiat.?”Apartheid housing invariably created environmental problems.?We tried to prevent this by creating a sense of pride in the living environment.”
After 1994, the government allocated about R1,2-million for state housing subsidies, triggering the construction of low-cost housing on an unprecedented scale.?In the areas surrounding the Msunduzi river in Pietermaritzburg, the municipality was not able to deliver basic environmental services to new townships.?Excavated areas remained bare, refuse was not collected, open areas were not planted.
The result was soil erosion, waste dumps, clogging of stormwater drains and rapid deterioration of infrastructure. BESG was retained by the Pietermaritzburg municipality in 1997 to harness community efforts to solve the problem.
“Our first project was a pilot consisting of 160 households at Ntuthukoville,” says Jogiat. “We were jointly contracted by the municipality and the community associations, with a mandate to work with the residents to solve environmental problems.
“We hired township residents to plant grass, clean streets, clear drains and channels, clean and maintain public facilities and cut the lawns.?They also transport household refuse to a central skip, so the municipality can remove it.”
From a small backyard experiment the project has grown exponentially to 4 500 households over two adjacent townships, and will grow to 6?000 within a year.
Job creation has grown from seven people to 43 most of whom are female breadwinners.?The recruitment and management is handled by local community forums.
The municipality has provided the funding so far, but plans to stop doing so next year. BESG is moving into the second phase of the project, which is aimed at making it self-sustainable.
“The programme has four levels. We call them build, operate, train and transfer or Bott,” says Jogiat.?”We will soon be able to implement the transfer part, which means we begin to hand the project out to the community in its entirety.”
It’s not a bad hand-over: more than 200 trees have been planted, verges are now grassy and erosion has been stopped.?The project is cheaper and more effective than a municipal service.
Local residents have whole-heartedly supported the project. Workers even continued working without interruption when an administrative glitch held up their salaries.
The sense of pride in the townships has become tangible. People are seeing the difference on their own doorsteps.?And woe betide any resident who litters or dumps his refuse irresponsibly workers have been known to take swift action against offenders.