Housing for all

Cameroon has an annual deficit in housing estimated at 130,000 decent housing. There is a continual expansion of spontaneous habitat around large urban centres on sometimes inappropriate grounds (erodible lands, marshy and/or floodable areas, parcels on hilly areas susceptible to landslides, etc.) that sometimes do not have adequate facilities
needed and where a large section of households with very modest or modest incomes are concentrated.
Cameroon’s current growth of about 5% induces a strong need for housing construction, estimated for the cities alone at some 80,000 units per year. Such growth implies the production of housing and public facilities.
The efforts of the public authorities, because of too high technical standards, have been deployed exclusively for the benefit of the upper middle class and in economic conditions that prohibit both the replicability of operations and the simple maintenance of the built heritage.
Housing, but also the quality of housing, must be considered in the coming years as one of the very foundations of a policy of progress. For that, we will:
– Develop social housing and home improvement programmes.
– Offer every Cameroonian access to decent housing and the possibility of owning their home if they wish.

Access to secure land ownership in cities

We should allow the largest number of households to become secure land owners. In this perspective, we will commit ourselves to:
– Refocus the tasks of the State in the regulation and the in-depth revision of the housing construction policy
– Stimulate and strengthen the action of the private sector and to encourage it to intervene in the promotion, construction of residential housing and housing programmes.
– Reduce land speculation by setting up a policy of granting urban land development to private operators for the production of equipped sites, the marketing of which will be carried out under the control of the State.
– Strengthen the missions of the MAETUR in the constitution, the management of land reserves and the
development of cities.
– Lower and better recover property taxes on built and undeveloped land.
– Drastically reduce spontaneous dwellings.

Social housing based on local materials

Our approach will be to improve existing techniques by focusing on local materials. For example, we have: the earth en brick in the West, the plank in the Littoral, the land and the wood in the centre and the South, the land in the North, the stone in the mountainous regions of the South-West. To promote the use of local materials in construction, we will:
– Elaborate construction techniques adapted to each region of the country in collaboration with our
regional universities.
– Strengthen the capacities of the Promotion Mission of Local Materials (MIPROMALO)
– Propose to the populations, in collaboration with the architects, techniques allowing to produce, at a modest cost, the comfortable housing respectful of the environment.

Social housing first in the countryside

We intend to reverse the rural exodus by transforming or improving the habitat and living environment in rural areas, endowing populations living in these areas of initial resources to start or develop income generating activities. In this regard, we will:
– Intensify the construction of social housing for low-income households.
– Regulate rents in social housing to put an end to speculation.

Reduce the sprawl of our cities

In major cities, housing will be redesigned to avoid too much sprawl that makes it extremely difficult and expensive the establishment of basic equipment such as water, electricity, and public transport. To this end, we will:
– Promote reasonably sized housing on plots averaging 150 m2.
– Encourage the construction of high-rise housing to build on a ground floor of about 80 m2, a house with a living room, a modern kitchen, two bathrooms and 3 to 4 bedrooms.
– Engage our architects to propose an efficient and harmonious use of this space to make cohabit small vegetable crops and modern and very functional homes.

Strengthen the missions of land credit for social housing

Moderate interest loans will be granted for popular construction. The terms of access to these loans will be simple and the guarantees easy to give, the State intervening in the last instance in case of default of these guarantees. In this perspective, the following measures will be adopted:
– Merge Crédit Foncier with Feicom in order to create a Housing and Communal Development Bank (BHDC) whose mission will be to finance the construction of social housing and the economic infrastructure of the municipalities (markets, shopping centres, industrial area, etc.);
– BHDC loans will be granted at 80% to real estate developers to mass build social housing in Douala and
Yaoundé (100 homes/ha) under a presidential project or 30,000 homes per metropolis per year, with local materials, 300,000 dwellings between Douala and Yaoundé in 6 years.
-Realise a new master plan of the cities of Douala and Yaoundé by the National Company for Study and Control of Works (NCSCW) by favouring straight and wider roads, interchanges and round points to reduce traffic jams.

Encourage real estate development for housing for the middle class

• create a new housing product with a total value of no more than 5,000,000 CFA francs, especially in major cities and medium-sized cities.
• Make the middle-class solvent through appropriate bank financing mechanisms.

Revive an active housing construction policy

We would like to increase the production of urban housing with the assistance of the private sector to meet the estimated needs of 80,000 homes per year, including 30,000 for each of the cities of Douala and Yaoundé. We will thus:
– Undertake construction programs with the private sector to reduce the cumulative stock of housing claims estimated at 600,000 units.
– Provide rural housing with large allocations under the Social Fund for Housing.
– Use local materials as much as possible to reduce the cost of housing construction

New regulations for housing

We will reform the entire institutional and regulatory system concerning housing, including professions in the sector (land surveyors, urban planners, real estate developers, etc.) through:
– Simplification of procedures;
– Incentives for developers and other private investors
– Setting up support systems for the population;
– The repositioning of all public actors in the housing sector.