By Franca Ofili
Mr Yemi Adelakun, Managing Director, Nigeria Integrated Social Housing (NISH) Affordable Housing Ltd has advocated good governance and a robust savings scheme to enable the country to deliver a proper cooperative housing scheme.
Adelakun made the call in Abuja on Monday at a stakeholders’ quarterly workshop on cooperative housing in Nigeria with the theme, “’Aggregating Off-takers’ Savings for Affordable Housing in Nigeria’’.
He called for a special savings scheme to ensure inclusive growth and development.
“The success factors of cooperative housing are good governance, trust, transparency and accountability, capacity building, respect and strict adherence to rule of law, checks and balances with continuous monitoring and auditing.
“Others are robust savings scheme, electronic data management and information communication technology,’’ Adelakun said.
He said the objective of the workshop was ‘’to organise, empower, and acquaint cooperative leaders with Innovative Cooperative Housing Principles.
According to him, the workshop will sensitise them to aggregate members’ equity contributions through saving for effective and sustainable delivery of affordable housing to co-operators.
Adelakun said the workshop was designed to strengthen the governance capacity, transparency and accountability of housing cooperatives through information and communications technology.’’
“The core inspiration behind the workshop is for NISH and partners to use this method to ensure that they develop a very strong and effective housing cooperatives system in Nigeria,’’ he said.
He identified six most critical challenges of affordable housing as land, technology, expert knowledge and skilled manpower; building materials, infrastructure and finance.
Adelakun said the lack of off-takers’ access to credit line was the major challenge that must be tackled for the country to achieve a successful affordable housing delivery.
Mr Anders Lindquist, Chief Business Development, EchoStone, said that every country had housing deficit but that Nigeria had the highest deficit.
EchoStone is an international provider of affordable housing solutions.
Lindquist called for more workshops to educate buyers and promised to work with the stakeholders to achieve their goals.
He called on government to be more interested in ensuring that affordable houses were made available to Nigerians.
Lindquist said that good governance was vital to achieving affordable housing.
He urged the workshop to ensure that action would be taken not just talk. (NAN)