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Development of Rural Housing

South Sudan at the moment has virtually no rural shelter policies and therefore, people living in the rural areas provide their own poor quality shelters within the context of subsistence economies. Majority of the rural inhabitants are poor or on low-income and hence use simple traditional ways of constructing their own shelters from local materials. People in the rural areas face a number of problems which include:

  • Widespread absence of safe water supplies and sanitation facilities.
  • In some situations, the inability to separate the accommodations of domestic animals from those of human beings.
  • The prevalence of a number of deficient features of housing structures, including leaking roofs, unstable walls and poor floors, all requiring frequent repairs and prematurely becoming structurally dangerous.
  • Lack of robust houses that can withstand the vagaries of nature, including floods, strong winds and earthquakes.
  • Lack of energy and telecommunications services to the rural population.

The Sunrise Democratic Party’s government will tackle the above stated challenges by initiating sustainable shelter projects in rural areas. This can be summarised as follows:

  • The use of locally available renewable resources in ways which ensure that environmental assets are not degraded or depleted.
  • Build adequate local capacity to plan and administer the implementation of long-term housing, water and sanitation programmes.
  • Build adequate local capacity to mobilize financial resources on a continuous basis in ways which guard against long-term reliance on external support.
  • The use of appropriate technologies which, as far as possible, utilize locally available human and material resources and achieve the required standard of safety and affordability.
  • The adoption of solutions which the majority of the rural poor can afford and which achieve the minimum standards for housing, water and sanitation.
  • Provision of cheaper and affordable energy and telecommunications services to the rural population.
  • Provision of adequate shelter for re-settlement, reintegration of IDPs and returnees, and building their resilience within local communities.