Pan African Housing Development Financier, Shelter Afrique through its foundation, the Shelter Afrique Foundation, has donated relief materials to over 4000 beneficiaries in Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Kenya where it has regional offices.
The foundation’s intervention comes after many African countries have implemented preventive and restricted measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
These measures have proven useful and necessary but have placed an undue burden on those who work in the informal sector, which according to the International Labour Organisation, represents 86 per cent of the African Labour force. These informal workers earn their living daily and have been gravely impacted by the restriction on movement which impairs their ability to trade and provide for their families.
It is on this basis that the Shelter Afrique Foundation has provided relief materials to over 4000 beneficiaries across Africa; the relief package includes dry goods, detergents, and other staple foodstuffs.
Speaking on behalf of the Managing Director at the handover ceremony in Daki-biyu Village, Mrs Elizabeth Ogonegbu, the Regional Manager for Nigeria, noted that:
“It is easy while ensuring the health and well-being of ourselves and our families, to forget that society is made of the many, not the few. Society will have to come together to relieve the burden Coronavirus places on all on us; society cannot be the government alone; it is the Civil Society, Private and Public Sector.”
The Shelter Afrique Foundation supports Shelter Afrique’s advocacy and research work, created in 2016 the foundation had an initinal endowment of USD 1.7 million dollars and receives an agreed percentage from the Company’s profits. While active in advocacy and research, this activity marks the first Corporate Social Responsibility of the organisation that targets low-income beneficiaries.
Ogonegbu added, “These are urgent times; indeed, there is little left of our daily lives which have not been affected in one way or the other by the Global Pandemic. The burden this pandemic place on us is unduly heavier on some of us, and that is why we are here today; The Shelter Afrique Foundation, the arm of our company which deals with Civil Society engagement has identified family sustenance as essential during these urgent times”.
Shelter Afrique has vowed to continue to find ways to support member countries during the crisis and is mainly concerned with how the crisis will impact affordable housing in member countries. The Centre of Excellence, a unit of the organisation dedicated to research and funded by the foundation has begun anticipating the many ways the pandemic will reshape affordable housing in Africa.
