OS-House Ghana Ltd is a social enterprise created to address the overall quality of life in urban areas and create a positive ecological footprint by providing affordable, modular and sustainable housing concepts in Ghana and facilitating access to housing credit for both end-users and developers.

The fundamental opportunities identified by the OS-House Ghana in the housing value chain are lack of affordable mortgage finance for people in transition from low to middle income; lack of affordable construction finance for developers, expensive and unsustainable building practices in spite of abundant local building materials and the cumbersome land registration procedures that deter prospective building plots owners from registration their lands.

Goals/objectives

OS-House is a social business concept with several key objectives/activities:

• To facilitate the development and access to affordable and sustainable housing for people in transition from low to middle income class
• To mobilize and link target prospective client groups to project developers and mortgage institutions
• To promote the use of local building materials in the Ghanaian market
• To provide land documentation assistance to prospective client groups
• To provide user centred building designs and drawings
• To match financial institutions and developers to long term funding

It seeks to provide affordable, sustainable and modular housing to the lower middle-income class. It is based on the belief that, the lower middle class is growing rapidly in Ghana, especially in urban areas and housing deficit for the lower middle class (teachers, nurses, civil servants etc.) is very high. Real estate developers are focussing only on the high end of the housing market and the groups with less income must build houses themselves. The lower middle class is also where ‘consuming’ starts in an unsustainable way. People living in slums are probably the most ‘sustainable’ people, re-using materials and consuming very little. The lower middle class engage in their own housing development with absolutely no support from government or any institutions and because of the lack of technical assistance offered to them, they engage in unsustainable building practices

Status of the project

The pilot phase of the project is currently being implemented in Cape Coast, Ghana. 

• Land for the pilot two houses have been acquired and registered. 
• Emerging Ghana has received the building permit. 
• Drawings for WBC design have been submitted for building permit approval. 
• A contractor has been selected and the contract document is signed. The construction of the Emerging Ghana design starts from the 1st of May 2011.
• Construction of the two pilot houses is expected to take three months to complete. This will be ready by September.
• Target client with cooperative land ownership are being organised from the various employee based groups. Some have expressed their interest in our first 100 houses. Employee based groups (Ghana National Association of Teachers and National Association of Graduate Teachers) are consulting with their members after initial interaction with OS-House Ghana team so that they can give us letters of intent and official letters allowing OS-House Ghana to beginning registering their lands.
• The first draft of the business plan has been concluded and the first 100 houses target set to begin in November 2011.