A year on…

In July 2007 Communicare decentralised its services to three Area Housing Offices, ensuring greater accessibility to its tenants and the more effective management of its housing stock. These Area Housing Offices are located in Brooklyn, Diep River and Ruyterwacht and provide a full range of housing and supportive services to our clients and stakeholders.

Open Days

It has now been a year since the inception of these offices and to celebrate this momentous occasion with our tenants, staff and board members as well as our local area stakeholders, we held Open Days at each of our Areas Offices. We believe these Open Days contributed to building stronger relationships with our tenants and stakeholders and encouraged open communication between the various parties.

Our Company had the opportunity to host an official delegation from the Swaziland Housing Ministry on the 14th to 15th of May 2008. The 12 person delegation was led by Minister Mabili Dlamini who was accompanied by the Swaziland National Housing Board.

The Swaziland delegation made a formal request for a week long visit which included the office of the MEC Dyantyi on 12th May 2008, Communicare on 14 on 15 May 2008 and the City of Cape Town being hosts for the 16th May 2008 respectively.

The visit was essentially geared towards understanding the South African housing delivery approach focusing on the strategy, policy and housing programme pursued by Communicare and its two delivery partners around informal housing settlements, integrated human settlements and in particular the housing and financial models for developing and management of social rental and gap housing stock.

The delegation’s visit was a result of a visit to the Swaziland National Housing Board by Joel Mkunqwana and Rick Brosens from Communicare three months ago. Their aim was to gain practical exposure to the implementation of their management information system in relation to property. The Swaziland National Housing Board showed interest in the social housing programme of Communicare and this led to the possibility of exploring further visits between the two organizations for shared knowledge base and future co-operation on comparative housing programmes and approaches relative to their own social housing programme as a developer and manager of similar rental stock.

In respect of the period hosted by Communicare, the delegation was officially welcomed by our Chairman, Mr Fourie, who gave a brief background on the history of the Company and how it began and attained its achievements to date. This was followed by a high level presentation by our MD, Chris Mathias on how Communicare operated in terms of its Board, Committee, management and governance structures with both Messrs Mkunqwana and Brosens covering the core housing approach and how the support business contributes to the sustainability of its social housing programmes and projects. Their delegates, Busa Masina and David Dlamini also presented their housing approach and outlined the legislative and programme guidelines they followed in pursuit and implementation of affordable housing opportunities. This appeared to be informed largely by their historical, cultural background and urban/rural development challenges to housing which had resulted in the strong inclination to sustainable and integrated human settlements, largely common to the South African housing challenges and delivery context.

The visitors were shown Communicare’s area housing offices in Ruyterwacht and Brooklyn, complexes and rental units under our management and new housing projects at Aliwal Gardens, Norwood Gardens and Riverton Mews. We also showed them the planned development in Drommedaris (Koeberg) and how it served as a true commitment to well located infill housing project that characterised the integrated approach to housing.

They were generally impressed by the programme and felt that Communicare had progressed far ahead and would be a good barometer for them to measure their own respective programmes. They seemed to be generally positively inclined and understanding of the approach.

We then hosted them to lunch at Moyo restaurant which was also received very well by the hosts and there was reaffirmation of the commitment to further exchange knowledge and experiences on specific housing development and management programmes which would be reflected on a MoU between Communicare and the Swaziland National Housing Board.

JOEL MKUNQWANA
SOCIAL HOUSING & COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE

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