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8
T
here is a need for the country to
find more sustainable and in-
novative ways to solving many
of the housing challenges.
The National Home Builders Reg-
istration Council (NHBRC) has been
tasked to promote the uptake of
Innovative Building Technologies
(IBT) and find ways to enhance per-
formance issues, especially if certi-
fied systems are used for large scale
projects.
Industry doyenne, Mahachi says,
“Due to a shortage of technical skills
at the levels where housing projects
are procured and managed, more
guidance is required to ensure good
quality houses are rolled out. How-
ever, it is not known how the ‘as-built’
IBT systems perform in terms of its
certification, of which the theoretical
evaluation is accepted to be enough
verification on the outcome of the
end product.”
An assessment tool was devel-
oped that evaluates the physical
condition of constructed IBT homes.
This study aims to determine the
condition of IBT houses through es-
tablishing the latent defects any time
after the construction process.
The presentation mainly focusses
on the results of a starting phase of
inspections and pilots the tool for a
number of IBT systems in the country.
Using descriptive statistics one can
measure the dispersion around the
central tendency of the inspected
IBT houses.
The results indicated a median
andmean of the overall performance
in terms of defects that is acceptable,
but provides a variance or dispersion
that is negatively skewed and can be
a cause for concern.
South African housing shortage
continues to grow amid delivery
of homes still more focused on the
quantity and less on the quality.
Government and human settlements’
stakeholders have committed to
deliver 1,5million housing opportuni-
ties by 2019.
A few recent initiatives include
the enhancement of norms and stan-
dards that took effect on 1 April 2014
to include energy efficiency inter-
ventions. Human Settlements aims
to encourage the use of innovative
building systems produced locally to
contain costs.
Sustainability has been en-
trenched in South Africa’s policies
and legislation since the country’s
emergence as a democratic state in
1994. One means of regulating inno-
vation inbuilding technology in terms
of the Housing Consumers Protection
Innovation pioneer and National Home Building Registration
Council technical guru, Dr Jeffrey Mahachi told delegates at
the 2016 National Human Settlements Conference that the
housing sector in South Africa is facing many challenges to
meet the ever growing demands of the poor.
Assessing ‘AS built’
Dr Jeffrey Mahachi