Housing in Southern Africa October-November 2016

Innovation pioneer and National Home Building Registration Council technical guru, Dr Jeffrey Mahachi told delegates at the 2016 National Human Settlements Conference that the housing sector in South Africa is facing many challenges to meet the ever growing demands of the poor. Assessing ‘AS built’

T here is a need for the country to find more sustainable and in- novative ways to solving many of the housing challenges. The National Home Builders Reg- istration Council (NHBRC) has been tasked to promote the uptake of Innovative Building Technologies (IBT) and find ways to enhance per- formance issues, especially if certi- fied systems are used for large scale projects. Industry doyenne, Mahachi says, “Due to a shortage of technical skills at the levels where housing projects are procured and managed, more guidance is required to ensure good quality houses are rolled out. How- ever, it is not known how the ‘as-built’

IBT systems perform in terms of its certification, of which the theoretical evaluation is accepted to be enough verification on the outcome of the end product.” An assessment tool was devel- oped that evaluates the physical condition of constructed IBT homes. This study aims to determine the condition of IBT houses through es- tablishing the latent defects any time after the construction process. The presentation mainly focusses on the results of a starting phase of inspections and pilots the tool for a number of IBT systems in the country. Using descriptive statistics one can measure the dispersion around the central tendency of the inspected IBT houses. The results indicated a median andmean of the overall performance in terms of defects that is acceptable, but provides a variance or dispersion that is negatively skewed and can be a cause for concern. South African housing shortage continues to grow amid delivery of homes still more focused on the quantity and less on the quality. Government and human settlements’ stakeholders have committed to deliver 1,5million housing opportuni- ties by 2019. A few recent initiatives include the enhancement of norms and stan- dards that took effect on 1 April 2014 to include energy efficiency inter- ventions. Human Settlements aims to encourage the use of innovative building systems produced locally to contain costs. Sustainability has been en- trenched in South Africa’s policies and legislation since the country’s emergence as a democratic state in 1994. One means of regulating inno- vation inbuilding technology in terms of the Housing Consumers Protection

Dr Jeffrey Mahachi

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