Federation Housing Project at Amatikwe

This project was launched by the South African Alliance of the Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP) and uTshani the national urban poor fund in October 1999 with support from the Amatikwe Savings Scheme. Amatikwe is part of the larger township of Inanda on the outskirts of Durban. Rapid population growth of the area started with the demolition of Cato Manor settlement starting in the late 1950s as well as droughts in rural areas of the province. This lead to many of KZN’s poor moving migrating here. The 1980s saw violent territorial conflicts between political parties the Inkatha Freedom Party and United Democratic Front/African National Congress (ANC). The long-term result of this is ANC hegemony of the settlement, which has been exercised at the expense of deep democratic participation by citizens in the area. At this time, in part to deal with land title complexities the Government embarked on a large site and service scheme in the area moving over 3000 families from freehold land (where they were tenants) to state land where they had the option to purchase. Many community leaders who grew out of this played an important role in the emergence of growth of the Federation in the area. By the 1990s Amatikwe was an informal settlement that had been regularized and demarcated into serviced sites by the Independent Development Trust (IDT), a Government affiliated development agency. The Federation has sought to get the State to fund community planning and housing as well as influence Government policy on a larger scale, focusing on land tenure and housing. Even though the Federation and its partners successfully got housing delivery off the ground long before other stakeholders, a later private sector focus on anti-poor planning regulations and disregard for poor people’s initiatives in 1994 – 1999 stagnated this progress.