The Right to Housing: Innovative and effective approaches to affordable housing for all
June 29, 2022 | 14:30 - 16:00
Summary
Housing is considered one of the main enablers to sustainable and inclusive urban prosperity and realized human rights for all.
Inclusive accessibility to adequate housing supports building human capital and allowing all people to contribute effectively to sustainable development.
Additionally, well-planned new housing projects are considered a unique chance for creating and equitably distributing urbanization values.
These values are not only reflected in the economic opportunities related to the construction and real-estate sector, but also vast social and environmental chances.
However, meeting the growing demand for urban housing presents one of the huge challenges worldwide, which in many cases lead to the growth of informal areas and declined quality of living for vulnerable urban populations.
In line with the new urban agenda, the global housing strategy, and the new Egyptian Constitution (2014); Egypt published its National Housing profile in 2016 as a first step to understand and assess its housing sector.
Based on the analysis, in 2020 the National Housing Strategy in Egypt was published to ensure improved, equitable access to affordable housing and communities.
Even long before the profile and strategy were published, Egypt has had one of the strongest social housing programs that served more 3.86 million families since 1950s and until 2017.
This was achieved under the umbrella of (Social Housing and Mortgage Finance Fund - SHMFF) with multiple changes and updates to the technical, financial and management schemes.
The program is designed to assist the government of EGYPT to improve the performance of the housing sector by designing and implementing new programs that provide adequate and affordable housing units for low-income households, hence building integrated housing communities with needed services through designing and coordinating policies in the affordable housing sector.
This session will discuss the potential role that social housing programs play in inclusive urbanization and the realization of human rights.
Objectives
The shared experiences and lessons learned from a number of countries focusing on:
- Participatory, demand-based, and inclusive social housing planning
- Elevating the rights of vulnerable groups
- Innovative financial, subsidization and implementation mechanisms
- The role of the private sector, civil society and financial institutions in advancing social housing programs
- The role of technology and digitalization in managing housing sector data
This shall provide a comparative analysis and support drawing conclusion and general recommendations on key aspects of a effective social housing programs and its role in realization of human rights for all.