Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
19 June 2009
Chidenguele — The Mozambican government's Housing Promotion Fund (FFH) hopes to build 3,000 houses a year, according to its chairperson Helena Ribeiro, speaking at this week's meeting of the Consultative Council of the Ministry of Public Works, held in the southern resort of Chidenguele.
Currently, the FFH is building a few dozen houses a year. Its main activity has been to mark out plots of land on which families can build their own houses. It also provides loans with which these families can purchase building materials.
Ribeiro argued that the FFH needs to do much more building if it is to fulfill the purpose for which it was set up. But to build 3,000 houses a year, the FFH will have to raise the money from somewhere.
One possibility, she suggested, would be to allocate between one and three per cent of the Mozambican state budget to fund a housing bank, aimed essentially at providing houses that young Mozambicans can buy.
The FFH has been financed out of the rents paid by the tenants of state-owned housing. But the great majority of the houses once managed by the State Housing Administration (APIE) have now been sold to their tenants. Very few remain, and so the source of FFH funding is drying up.
In the last five years, the FFH received 200 million meticais (about 7.5 million US dollars) from the government which was used to build 139 houses, demarcate 5,400 plots of land for building, and offer 156 construction loans.
Hopes that the FFH can be transformed into a Housing Bank have so far been frustrated and the indications are that it will take a considerable time before this happens.
Public Works Minister Felicio Zacarias declared on Wednesday that he had wanted the Bank operational by 2006. "If it had been up to us, then the FFH would have been transformed into a Housing Promotion Bank in 2006", he told reporters. "We're still working on the matter".
But since the current government is now reaching the end of its term of office, Zacarias did not want to speculate on when the Housing Bank might be created.
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