The Journal of African Business Issue 7

ACCELERATING
THE DELIVERY
OF AFFORDABLE
HOUSING
Rali Mampeule is passionate about
bringing housing within the reach of
residents of African cities. The
launch of the African Housing
and Infrastructure Fund heralds
a new era of expansion for a
model of making serviced land
available that has worked
extremely well in South Africa.
A
A housing model is being rolled out that will see
affordable and integrated developmental cities
developed around the continent.
That’s the dream of Rali Mampeule, founder and
Chief Executive Officer of the African Housing and
Infrastructure Fund (AHIF). This is not a dream that exists
in the clouds, this is a dream based on what this successful
entrepreneur has already achieved with an innovative
solution to a shortage of good-quality affordable housing.
As a result of this far-sighted vision, thousands of plots of
land in South Africa now have family homes on them.
And the dream is not limited to bricks and mortar
either. Rali and his team have been cooperating with
scientists and researchers to work on and develop
the latest technology to fast-forward the process of
developing and building homes.
The essence of the model is that Rali and his team
buy land and prepare it for development. Given that in
South Africa, many regional authorities were returning
unused funding meant for the development of housing
to the National Treasury, Rali set out to prise open that
bottleneck of funding and development that was choking
the delivery of housing.
To deal with what he calls South Africa’s “two-millionunit
housing crisis” Rali established the South African
Housing and Infrastructure Fund (SAHIF) as a means
of tackling the challenge of affordable housing in South
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