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

Botswana's Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA) scheme, established in 1973 and administered through local authorities such as Gaborone City Council, 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 — a 'site-and-service' model widely promoted across Southern Africa from the 1970s onward.
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) — the latter 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: original low-income allottees are increasingly selling their SHHA plots to middle-income buyers as Gaborone's housing demand and prices rise, a form of gentrification that the authors warn risks displacing the low-income group the scheme was built for and pushing them back toward informal settlement. The core structural problems identified are a persistent shortage of serviced land and insufficient finance for plot development — limitations that, following the evidence rather than the programme's ambition, earn it a cautious rating here.

Read the full analysis: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ijhma-06-2017-0059/full/html