Minister Ali noted that within the two-days of the Region Three outreach, the Housing Ministry was able to process in excess of 1,500 transactions.

“We are very happy that we have looked at that amount of transactions varying from transport issues, squatter settlement issues, allocation of houselots, agreement of sales, payments and addressing of GWI concerns in terms of leaks and customers connections …We had a very successful ‘One stop shop’ outreach in Region Three for those two-days,” he said.

“We would like to thank the public who came out in large numbers (Region Three) to benefit out of this system that we’ve implemented. We also want to thank the banking sector, the developers for being there, to work this collective mechanism in moving from land ownership to home ownership and in improving the efficiency and transparency and cost of doing business with the Ministry of Housing and Water,” he stated.

The Housing Ministry will be mounting a housing and water exhibition early in May where key stakeholders will be involved once again at a common forum to demonstrate and interact with persons about their products and services in order to develop a package to meet people’s requirements.

In addition, he said his Ministry, as part of its focus to consolidate existing housing schemes, will be bringing on stream an additional service targeting low-income land owners.

“We are trying to provide an additional service free of cost to low-income land owners since they will have to move to home owner stage. That initiative would see our engineering unit at the Ministry of Housing developing a few options, low-cost housing options with detailed bill of quantities, architectural and engineering drawings and all the requirements needed at the bank,” he said.

Minister Ali added that the package will give low-income land owners an opportunity to review and choose designs while having the entire package free of cost to take to the bank to acquire a loan.

“We are happy that we are able now to move to that stage of development. This was part of government’s promise in the manifesto to increase the delivery of services to our people and to reduce the cost of that service delivery,” Minister Ali stated. (GINA)