The outcome of the ANCs long-awaited KwaZulu-Natal conference was a win for the Thuma Mina crowd. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
A number of years ago, Lesley Freedman spent some time in the Eastern Cape working as part of the Heritage Management Plan team. While there, she realised that the building style in the area might be the answer to some of the fundamental issues creating South Africa’s housing crisis. She began to look into earth building and settlement change, studying in France and travelling to Mali to see how people had been building there for centuries. “I realised that the solution to settlement challenge in SA would be for people to do it for themselves — it has to be sustainable.”
With this in mind, Freedman created the Whole Earth Building Foundation team to help improve quality of life in communities that need affordable housing. The foundation is made up of highly specialised structural engineers, architects and a permaculturist. “It’s becoming increasingly urgent to limit the use of building programmes that are unsustainable in their requirement for high technology, large capital, specialised skills and their production of greenhouse gases and carbon emissions.”
Through Whole Earth, volunteers receive on-site training. They then receive accreditation in building, food gardening, energy management, water saving and recycling methodologies. They are then also employable, having skills in highly coveted trades. Currently the team have partnered with the Klein Begin Community and are fundraising to actualise the project. Working with the foundation, the community has identified the need for a library, a social centre and a kitchen — all of which will be classified as permacultural and biodynamic zones.
The team has also designed an RDP prototype that is more sustainable, better for the environment and easier and cheaper for residents to build and maintain.
“The government provides a housing subsidy of R113 000. The RDP programme provides beneficiaries with a completed house, built by big construction companies, so the local economy does not benefit. Our aim is to train people to build in different natural building technologies, within the budget,” says Freedman. The foundation is now looking at Khayelitsha and is in talks to find land there.
“We need to promote self-reliance. We need to realise that we can do it ourselves, all by ourselves. We can redress social, economic and environmental inequalities. We can create these urgently needed livelihoods and ourselves promote the green economy. We can be the change.”