Shelter and housing is a thorny issue in Kenya. Majority of the population, especially in urban areas live under severe inhuman conditions. The party is aware of the slums (informal settlements) some as old as 1950, and hundreds coming up everywhere across the country and mainly in all the cities and urban areas. The rural homes are not anything that we, as a country can be proud of as majority of families are not able to afford developing appropriate shelter for the family. The party believes that every citizen has a right to decent shelter in order that such facilities helps to lower the national health bill and to increase the citizens’ productivity and therefore creates wealth. Our goal is to ensure that every Kenyan has access to decent, affordable shelter and housing by 2030. We shall do this by addressing the following areas:

Ford Asili will promote laws and policies that encourage home ownership and investment in housing. As the party appreciates the importance of land and its relationship to housing policy, the party will endeavour to fight for harmonization of policies such as those related to land, financial services, employment, and environmental planning so as to develop a national housing programme. To be able to encourage the people to own homes, incentives such as tax breaks will be introduced. Kenyans attaining the age of majority (18 years) will be encouraged to acquire self-housing (either owned or rented).

Kenya’s population is mainly settled in the rural areas. There is however heavy rural-urban migration (in search of jobs) that exerts a lot of pressure on the urban areas and also drains the rural areas of capital and human resources that ingrains ‘rural-urban capital flight’. Although this capital flight has not been economically quantified, FORD-Asili believes that rural-urban capital flight is one of the main causes of the heavy inequity between the development of the urban and rural areas. FORD-Asili believes in uniform socio-economic development for all Kenyans regardless of their situation. The party will put in place rural and urban development policies (to include setting up of manufacturing/proccessing industries) that enable the rural communities to access services and opportunities equally with those in the urban areas and to offer jobs that are rare to come by in the rural areas. We will therefore develop policies that will promote rural investment in industry, education and information/communication technology (ICT).