Papers by DW

With the approaching rainy season in Angola and new reports of cholera, which has been held in abeyance since the epidemic of 2007, public policy makers and consumers alike look at the implementation of long-delayed urban services reforms. Paying for services has become the Government’s mantra since the financial crisis hit two years ago and they were obliged to withdraw subsidies. Civil society and consumer groups at the same time demand equitable access and affordability when asked to pay for the first time for these services.

The last year has seen the introduction of some long-outstanding fiscal reforms in Angola’s housing economy. The new Minister of Housing and Urban Development Ms Branca do Espírito Santo has brought some new insights from her years in senior management in the nominally-private-sector real-estate company IMOGESTIN and even earlier as director of a civil-society organization. She assumed her new post, in March 2016, as Angola entered into its second year of economic crises after the collapse of the country’s commodity prices

The Kilamba project became the show-piece of Angola’s Housing and Urban Development Program announced by the President in 2008. With US$ 3.5 billion financing from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, purportedly backed by oil-revenues, the project was built in a record 18 months by CITIC a major Chinese consortium and completed in 2012. The Kilamba City project, includes 750 apartment buildings, schools, and more than 100 retail units. The new city was built to accommodate 160,000 people in 20,000 flats, each with a floor area of between 110 and 150 m2 and costing from US$120,000 to US$200,000. SONIP Housing had been created in 2013 as a real-estate arm of the Angolan state petroleum company SONANGOL. It was given the mandate to commercialize, manage and distribute 33,255 housing units of which 20,000 of them were in the recently completed Kilamba City. Kilamba has gained fame as being the largest Chinese built housing complex in Africa and the show-case of Angola’s post-war National Urban Housing Program. During the first year of SONIP’s management of Kilamba, it only distributed 12,425 units and acquired a substantial waiting list of impatient aspirant clients. Smaller, most affordable, three bedroom T3 units were in great demand but the larger expensive five-bedroom

units remained empty. By September 2013 the three and four bedroom units were exhausted2, and clients reluctantly accepted the larger units, but often expressed concerns about their capacity to make the payments of US$ 12,000 per year.

Access to land markets for housing and urban development continues to be both a challenge and an opportunity. Since its independence in 1975, and most notably since the end of the war, in 2002, Angola has undertaken to create a suitable legal framework to address the complex issues related to land access in the country. In 2004, the country promulgated a new law on land that has sought to strengthen areas taken as weakness in previous legislation. During the following decade a set of new legislation and regulations was published, covering issues such as concessions, and the functions of the local levels of government in the administration of land. However, ten years later, in December 2014, a national consultation on issues of land, led by private organizations came to the conclusion that the Land Law 9/04, did not deliver the expected results. Two key areas that have not been addressed in the legislation are the administration of land in peri-urban areas where the majority of the urban population live without the formal ownership and the regulation of customary land rights, particularly in rural areas.

“Alternatives to African Commodity-backed Urbanisation: the Case of China in Angola”, a paper presented by DW director Allan Cain at the Annual World Bank Conference Conference on Africa (ABCA 2016): Managing the Challenges and Opportunities of Urbanization in Africa, at Oxford University, June 13 to 14, 2016.

O Relatório Nacional de Angola para o Habitat III tem como referência os anos de 1996 (Aprovação da Agenda Habitat II em Istambul), 2002 (Alcance da paz efectiva em Angola) e 2008 (Lançamento do Programa Nacional do Urbanismo e Habitação), para monitorar os progressos alcançados pelo país no cumprimento das metas estabelecidas na Agenda Habitat II.

In the Habitat Agenda adopted in 1996, heads of state and governments committed themselves to two main goals, i.e., “Adequate Shelter for All” and “Sustainable Human Settlements in an Urbanizing World”, and to implement a plan of action based on these goals. In the Millennium Declaration, heads of state and governments committed themselves to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. They also committed themselves to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without adequate sustainable access to drinking water and basic sanitation.

The market of Roque Santeiro emerged as an important centre of the informal economy in Luanda in the 1980s as the government encouraged people who had begun to sell on street corners to move to what was, before 1985, a piece of waste ground and informal rubbish tip. Even then, though the government was not in favour of the growth of the informal economy it was unable to prevent it and felt that it could only move it to what was then a marginal location. In the late 1980s and 1990s Roque Santeiro was the largest market in the city (and possibly the largest open-air market in Africa) serving as the main distribution point for other markets as well as selling directly to the public: goods from other areas of Angola and goods imported through the port (a short distance away) were traded in bulk at Roque Santeiro and then traded in smaller quantities in other areas of the market or in other locations.
The informal trading economy in Luanda continued to grow in the decade after the achievement of peace in Angola. The main underlying factor that contributes to the continued importance of the informal trading economy is the shortage of formal employment, which leads to large numbers of people creating their own economic activities in ways that require only small amounts of capital and low levels of skill.
Roque Santeiro was closed in 2010. Many day and casual labourers have lost their livelihoods, a scenario which may have contributed to increased levels of crime and delinquency in Luanda. The market had been a huge source of employment within the city, and its transfer meant a loss of employment for stevedores and ambulant sellers who earned a daily livings there and local house owners who provided overnight temporary warehousing of merchandise.
The Government however has renewed its determined effort to stamp out informal trading in early 2014 by announcing a heavy regime of fines, not only on informal traders, but on their customers as well. The image of the informal trader is seen as an affront to those who wish to promote the vision of Luanda as a world-class modern city, despite the fact that these informal markets still provide essential services and employment to much of the urban population.

El artículo describe cómo el gobierno de Angola ha sido capaz de utilizar la financiación de líneas de crédito de China para construir proyectos de vivienda urbana de prestigio como los gobiernos busca hacer sus ciudades “clase mundial”. En este trabajo se analiza el apoyo del Gobierno de Angola para la ciudad de Kilamba desarrollado público-privada con 20.000 apartamentos. Los apartamentos eran inicialmente demasiado caro para la mayoría de la población, y el Estado ha tenido que sacar más fondos de su presupuesto de vivienda para un esquema de subsidio de alquiler con opción a compra para hacer las unidades asequibles para los funcionarios públicos de nivel medio. El autor sostiene que la oportunidad se está perdiendo de utilizar los ingresos de hoy a partir de recursos naturales de alto precio y la corriente de fácil acceso a las líneas de crédito de China y los conocimientos técnicos para hacer frente a los grandes atrasos en el mejoramiento urbano de la infraestructura de servicios básicos y la vivienda para los pobres. En el documento también se refleja en un período posterior a la independencia anterior cuando se construyeron una serie de nuevas ciudades africanas, dejando a algunos países con décadas de la deuda y el desarrollo estancado. ¿Puede errores de los últimos ofrecen lecciones para el futuro desarrollo urbano de África?