On 18 January last, the chairpersons of GRET and the Soliha Federation (in French only)* signed a charter of collaboration for innovation when considering the housing requirements of the poorest populations in the French overseas territories.
This charter is the culmination of several years of collaboration between the two organisations. The Pact-Arim federation and GRET began working together at the end of the 1980s, as part of the Programme Solidarité Habitat (Solidarity Housing Programme) (in French only), supported by the French Deposits and Consignments Fund, the Inter-Caribbean fund, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the European Union. GRET ensured the technical secretariat of the programme during its nine years of existence.
More recently, the following joint actions were conducted:
- reconstruction projects in Haiti, following the January 2010 earthquake;
- the design of innovations and experiments in terms of clearance and prevention of spontaneous urbanisation for the communes of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and Maripasoula, and for the Department of the environment, urban planning and housing in French Guiana;
- work in Mayotte, for the Agence française de development (AFD) on the one hand, and the Municipality of Mamoudzou on the other, as part of the new urban renewal project in Kawéni;
- in the overseas territories generally, a study conducted on the housing improvement needs of owner-occupiers by GRET for the Overseas Pact Club, the Pact Federation and the French Ministry of Overseas Territories.
This joint work was well received by the State, its agencies and local stakeholders, and made it possible to make significant contributions to reflections on urgently needed diversification of public policies in terms of housing for the poorest populations in the overseas territories; in particular where, amidst contexts of extremely high demographic growth and migratory flows, housing policies are incapable of responding to a large section of requirements. This work also made it possible to define possible avenues of intervention focusing on supervised total or partial self-builds and self-renovations.
GRET and the Soliha Federation were also invited on several occasions to the Ministry of Overseas Territories’ Housing seminars, to the congress of local public businesses, and to the Economic, social and environmental Council. An article on the innovation approach in French Guiana (in French only) was published in the Territoires en mouvement journal, published by the Science and Technology faculty of the University of Lille, and more recently in the Habitat et Francophonie journal.
Yet, faced with the scale of the challenges to be met, it is worrying to observe that it is so difficult and is taking so long for the State and local authorities to launch experiments, even on a modest scale. The joint studies conducted by the Soliha federation and GRET in French Guiana led to the publication of a new prefectural decree on home ownership assistance in French Guiana in July 2015, but to date, their testing has still not started. This situation convinced GRET and Soliha of the interest and pertinence of strengthening their collaboration and formalising a cooperation framework to design, promote and test new approaches. Both organisations are convinced that the State and local authorities have a vested interest in supporting social production processes in cities, by creating favourable conditions for their deployment.
* The Soliha Federation was generated by the merger of the Pact-Arim and Housing and Development movements.
