Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia — Community-Led Savings and In-Situ Upgrading

The Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) and its technical partner, the Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG), organise residents of informal settlements into daily community savings groups. Group members pool small contributions, negotiate directly with municipal authorities for serviced land, and jointly plan settlement layouts — locally known as 'blockerf' plots — before building.
Members can borrow from the SDFN's Twahangana Fund, a community-managed revolving loan facility, to buy building materials and construct homes with their own labour, cutting costs to roughly a third of contractor-built housing. Savings groups are run predominantly by women and set aside support for elderly and terminally ill members. The federation has grown to around 23,000 members across some 700 savings groups nationwide, and to date 3,200 households have secured land tenure through this process, with 1,350 houses built.
In 2026, SDFN national facilitator Edith Mbanga urged the Namibian government to prioritise in-situ upgrading over relocation, noting that 217,000 households — 28.7% of the country's 756,339 households — lived in informal settlements per the 2023 census, against a national housing backlog of roughly 300,000 units. Namibia's government has since set a 2027 target for informal-settlement upgrading, working with SDFN/NHAG and the post-2018 Community Land Information Programme, though SDFN itself cautions that land scarcity is the binding constraint on scaling further.

Read the full analysis: https://www.namibian.com.na/shack-dwellers-support-namibias-2027-plan-to-upgrade-informal-settlements/