Botswana's Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA) — A Cautionary Tale in Site-and-Service Housing

Botswana's Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA) scheme was established in 1973 and administered through local authorities such as Gaborone City Council, as part of a 'site-and-service' model widely promoted across Southern Africa from the 1970s onward.

The scheme allocates serviced or semi-serviced plots to low- and lower-middle-income households, who then build their own homes with agency-provided technical guidance and small loans.

Local authorities allocate plots and provide technical guidance and small loans to allottees for self-build housing construction.

Two peer-reviewed evaluations of SHHA areas in Gaborone reached similar conclusions a decade apart. Ikgopoleng and Cavric (2007, Spatium) and Kampamba, Kachepa, Nkwae, Matlhogojane and Outule (2018, International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, surveying 93 plots across old and new SHHA areas using a mixed-methods design at 90% confidence) both found that, on the whole, the scheme's impact on improving low-income urban housing has been unsuccessful. The 2018 study documents an accelerating pattern of property transfers, with original low-income allottees increasingly selling their SHHA plots to middle-income buyers as Gaborone's housing demand and prices rise.

The core structural problems identified are a persistent shortage of serviced land and insufficient finance for plot development. The gentrification pattern risks displacing the low-income group the scheme was built for and pushing them back toward informal settlement.