I am very pleased to be able to be with you today, especially since this is my first visit to a project this year, and I think it is meaningful to start 1997 by visiting a project which has successfully completed more than 1 200 houses since January 1996, with a further 1 042 houses scheduled to be completed by May, because I have declared 1997 to be the year of mass-delivery for low-cost housing in South Africa.
This achievement is particularly pleasing for me because 700 people from this community have been given work opportunities, and 18 of you have received special training in basic concrete technology through a programme implemented by PPC Cement. And jobs and training, ladies and gentlemen, are the key building blocks of our country's reconstruction and development. We have to translate national reconciliation into national prosperity. Within every housing project, capacity must be built to ensure local participation, local control and local jobs. In short, there must be work for our people. I was particularly pleased to learn that 98 percent of the labour for this housing project was drawn from the community of Bela Bela and that 40 percent of the labour force is made up of women.
There are a number of issues which are often raised by people as I travel around the country inspecting various housing projects. The size of houses which people are able to get from the subsidy is probably one of the most often raised issues. I cannot stress enough that I agree that the housing subsidy does not provide sufficient finance for a completed house. For the majority of our people, it only provides access to land with secure tenure plus shelter that meets little more than basic needs and these houses which we will be visiting later today, which are only 18 square metres in size, are evidence of that fact.
But I want to say to you all here today that this is only a start. The challenge now is for you to use your resources and efforts to increase the size of your house to something which you wish to have. And this is the fundamental backbone of our housing policy. We are providing opportunities to start a home. I hope to be able to come back here in a year's time and see how you have improved and added to these starter homes.
In South Africa, we have a backlog estimated at between two million and three million houses and central government does not have sufficient funds to meet the housing needs for South Africa. We estimate that 49 percent of all households in South Africa have an income below R1 000 per month. These people are unable to make any contribution towards finance for their houses and are dependent on the government subsidy to meet their housing needs. We estimate that in order to house a family adequately, a counter contribution to the value of R3 is required from other sources to every rand government spends on housing.
The challenge for government is to take cognisence of sustainability, affordability and capacity in trying to meet the ever emerging priorities for housing. One way to achieve this is to encourage developers to be innovative in terms of designs and costings, and to encourage more contributions in terms of sweat-equity and personal savings from beneficiaries, and these will be recurrent themes in my work this year.
As I have travelled around the country, it has become very evident to me that it is possible for houses of between 35 and 55 square metres to be built with the government subsidy. In the majority of those cases, it has been people building their own houses who have been able to achieve this. And we are relying on this, the people's housing process, to help us meet our promise of building or having started building one million houses by 1999.
In closing, let me say that I am confident that we will meet our promise and it is vital that we do because with an average of five people per household, it will mean that we will have provided adequate shelter for five million of our people. And this democracy will flounder if we cannot give people that most basic of all human rights, the dignity of a home of their own.
Thank you.