Achieving the Housing Objective of Millennium Development Goals (MDGS): The Promise of Co-operative Housing

Abstract

One of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020. Nigeria’s commitment to this Declaration has led to a plethora of economic reforms that address housing inadequacy and other development challenges. Among these is a policy shift from direct government participation to private sector participation in housing delivery. Several studies have, however, shown that, despite all these reforms, a great proportion of its population still lives in substandard and poor houses and in deplorable, unsanitary residential environments. The objective of this paper is to review some of these strategies vis-à-vis the socio-economic context of the nation’s polity with a view to finding the reasons they have not delivered as expected. The incompatibility of the market-driven reforms with the social and cultural needs and aspirations of Nigeria society was identified as a major impediment to housing delivery in the country. The paper contends that housing problem as a social good or service will remain intractable if its production is still controlled by the market forces. It then concludes by advocating cooperative approach to housing delivery and the management, maintenance and revitalization of the existing housing stocks.

Keywords: Cooperative housing, Millennium Development Goals, Public Private Partnership, Slum dwellers, Social capital