Short on shelter

Afghanistan is contending with housing problems aggravated by its rising population.

It is a daily ritual for 8-year-old Bismillah. Every morning he descends a rugged slope, five grimy plastic cans slung over his tiny shoulders, negotiating the steep pitches of scree and gravel with goat-like agility. At the bottom of the hill, he joins a long queue leading up to a hosepipe and waits his turn under the broiling sun.

Wait he must, or his family will be left without drinking water for the whole day.

Bismillah lives with his handicapped father, mother and four sisters in a mud-and-wood house in a cramped settlement on a hill overlooking Kabul.

With no direct water supply to houses, dwellers of these rudimentary housing settlements — all illegally built — need to lug water from the base of the hill. "Life is hard," says Suraiya Begum, Bismillah's mother, her face hidden behind the lavender fabric of her burqa. "We wouldn't live here if we had a better choice."

Six years after the US-led invasion, ask ordinary Afghans about the biggest challenge they face and their answer is not likely to be the Taliban. It is to have a roof over their heads.

Urgent necessity

The need is especially dire in Kabul where 70,000 houses were destroyed during the nearly 30 years of war. And a steady inflow of returnees has exacerbated the problem. With a population of 800,000 before the US-led invasion in 2001, Kabul is now home to over four million, many of them refugees returning home after the fall of the Taliban. It is estimated that about half of Kabul's population lives in squatter settlements.

Kabul's most urgent urban planning issues are linked to its rapid population growth. The situation is the same in other large cities like Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar as well. According to UN estimates, the population of Afghanistan is expected to increase by 14 million to about 37 million by 2015 and more than half of this growth will be in urban areas.

So far, foreign firms have invested $4.5 billion in rebuilding the country but very little of it has gone into housing, according to Omar Zakhilwal, the director of Afghanistan Investment Support Agency in Kabul.

In fact, an acute shortage of affordable housing is forcing people to build mud houses on slippery slopes of denuded hills around Kabul. Overcrowding has put a lot of pressure on the already frail civic infrastructure of the capital.

The UN says Afghanistan is the world's sixth least developed country. Only 13 per cent of Afghans have access to safe water, 12 per cent to adequate sanitation and just 6 per cent to electricity. Life expectancy is 44 years compared with 59 years for low-income countries worldwide.

For Suraiya Begum's family, life in the overcrowded settlement is unforgiving. When it rains, the roof leaks; a flood of muddy excrement flows down the slopes filling up the sewers and cesspits already choked with garbage; mounds of garbage accumulate in heaps in the alleyways leading up to her house.

There is a dearth of potable water. Piped water from the city reaches only 18 per cent of people in Kabul. Daily power cuts last from dawn until dusk in the winter and even longer in the summer.

Afghanistan's Ministry of Urban Development, with the World Bank's assistance, is now in the process of upgrading legal and illegal settlements in Kabul city. This $28.2 million project — which will take at least a few years to implement — will help improve infrastructure and provide basic services such as drinking water, sanitation, drainage, concrete roads and streetlights.

"Given [that] a vast majority lives in these settlements, the solution is to upgrade not demolish these homes and make more people homeless," says Yousuf Pashtun, the Afghan Minister of Urban Development, an architect and town planner by training.

But, despite the efforts, Kabul is facing a chronic shortage of housing for the poor. The per capita income in this post-Taliban nation, according to the World Bank, has increased from $180 in 2002 to $300 in 2006. Buying a house or an apartment, however, remains a distant dream for most of Kabul's citizens.

A two-bedroom apartment in Kabul can cost $200 to $400 a month, compared with $7 for a three-bedroom home before the war in 1978. In Wazir Akbar Khan and Shahr-e-Now, private housing rents have reached $7,000. That makes it impossible for the poor to pay for housing in Kabul and dramatically widens the class of impoverished Afghans.

Spiralling costs

Last year, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief expressed concerns that Afghanistan's housing prices are spiralling out of control and making a difficult situation worse for the Afghan poor.

"I didn't think we would face so many problems when we came back to Kabul," says Sangar Khan, a 24-year-old Afghan who returned to the country from Pakistan where he had fled to during the Taliban's reign. "We keep hearing so much money is being given for the reconstruction of Afghanistan but getting a house is the biggest challenge in this country. Renting a house is just not affordable any more."

Khan rents a squatter shack in an illegal settlement. As virtually all land in Kabul is claimed by one or more owners — individuals, companies or the government — squatter households are usually obliged to pay a rent to remain on a property.

Pashtun says he is aware of the acute housing shortage. The Afghan government, he says, with an investment of more than $200 million, is building a satellite town called Shahr-i-Sabz in northeast Kabul, with 100,000 houses due to be constructed in the next three years.

But, beyond the efforts of the government, Pashtun says, the private sector can play a big role to build houses for the
war-weary Afghans. At a dust-choked construction site some 20 miles north of Kabul, a private firm is in the process of building a swanky, new housing complex that, its builders promise, will change the face of Kabul's rustic skyline forever.

An ambitious $10 million housing project named "Green City", being financed by a private Afghan NGO called Khawar, promises housing to over 3,000 families in multistorey buildings and row houses spread over 2.5 million square feet. The project is due to be completed in two years.

Enayat Sahary is the Iranian born chief engineer of Green City. He says: "At the moment, Kabul stinks. It needs a makeover. Green City would be something the Afghans have never seen before."

However, the prices of apartments being built — at $470 per square foot — are almost beyond the reach of ordinary Afghans. Sahary attributes the high costs to the rising prices of overheads. Cement, diesel, labour — prices of all have rocketed since 2002.

"Fifty kilos of cement cost 100 Afghanis (Dh8) in 2002, now it costs 400 (Dh30); the cost of diesel, too, has nearly doubled since then," he says.

Growing population

Afghanistan is facing unprecedented population growth and rapid urbanisation, which is widening the gap in demand and supply of housing in urban areas such as Kabul and Jalalabad.

"Increasing access to housing finance is key to developing a large scale housing market in Afghanistan," says Sahary.

At a workshop conducted jointly by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation in April, where the findings of a study on Afghanistan's housing sector was presented, experts laid down specific recommendations for introduction of microfinance loans for home renovation, construction and purchase.

For the Shahr-i-Sabz housing complex, banks are to buy homes from the government and then mortgage them to buyers who will have to pay upto $150 every month for 15 years before becoming owners — a move to bring houses within the financial reach of Afghans.

Pashtun is hopeful Afghanistan's 14-odd banks will show keen interest in buying them up and offering them to buyers.

"Mortgage," he says, "is the only way we can make homes affordable to our middle class. People can't afford to pay lump sum amounts."

- Anuj Chopra is a freelance journalist based in Pune, India.