South Africa's housing backlog needs a new method

The Department of Human Settlements' budget for 2026/27 is about R27bn, with R2.9bn moving over the medium term from the main housing grant to informal settlement upgrading. With less money per year, the question is not only how many homes a budget can fund, but how quickly and predictably each rand turns into a home that lasts.

The same pattern shows up locally. In Fetakgomo-Tubatse in Limpopo, where we plan our first factory, the municipality's own planning documents put its delivery capacity at about 600 subsidised houses a year against a need of about 5,000.

In February 2026 the department and the National Home Builders Registration Council (NHBRC) hosted a national summit on innovative building technologies (IBT). The Minister later described it as "the end of experimentation and the beginning of implementation". A consolidated IBT implementation plan has been approved, and work is under way to bring IBT into the national housing code and its norms and standards.

The budget allows at least 2% of the main housing grant to be allocated to IBT projects. Allocation has lagged policy. In August 2026 Parliament's portfolio committee noted that only the Eastern Cape had met the 2% level for 2026/27, and that several provinces had allocated nothing. The committee called for the policy, regulation and funding to make IBT mainstream.

Our reading is constructive. Provinces will allocate to new methods when those methods arrive with certification, evidence and delivery capacity they can rely on. The burden of proof sits with the industry, and that is where it should sit.

Factory production changes what limits output. On a building site, output depends on how many skilled crews can work at once and on what the weather allows. In a factory, output depends on equipment, process and a disciplined supply of designs and sites. The repeatable part of the building is made under control, while foundations and services proceed in parallel.

This is not a theoretical argument. Singapore has required prefabricated prefinished volumetric construction on selected government land sales since 2014, and its building authority reports manpower and time savings of up to 40% on such projects. Hong Kong has used its equivalent, modular integrated construction, on more than 100 projects and requires manufacturers to be accredited before they bid for public work. Neither is South Africa, and their results are not ours. What both show is that policy, certification and manufacturing discipline together can change how a country builds.

A new method does not remove the other constraints on delivery. Land still needs rights, bulk services still need capacity, and homes still need funding and beneficiaries. Industrialised construction addresses one link in the chain, the construction of the structure. That link happens to be the one where time and quality are most often lost.

It also has to earn acceptance. In South Africa, a building system outside the conventional standards needs certification by Agrément South Africa before homes built with it can be enrolled with the NHBRC and occupied. That is a demanding process, and it should be.

Three conditions point to the next few years. Policy has moved from experimentation to implementation. Higher interest rates and scarce skills have raised the cost of slow, uncertain programmes. And new economic zones, such as the Fetakgomo-Tubatse special economic zone designated in May 2026, are creating concentrated demand for homes where people will work.

What remains is execution: building the first factory, certifying the system, delivering the first homes and letting the evidence do what argument alone cannot. That is the work Precast Africa was formed to do. You can read how we got here in our story.