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A decent a roof for all HABITAT FOR HUMANITY IN TANZANIA (HFHT) is a Dodoma based Non Governmental Organization (NGO). About 100 Tanzanian families have benefited from HFHT activities. As partners of HFHT, the families buy the houses with affordable price and without interest loans from the NGO. HFHT builds, renovate and repairs simple and decent housing with people who are living in inadequate housing and who are unable to secure adequate housing by conventional means. According to HFHT's policy, the home owners' mortage payments go into a revolving fund that is used to build more houses in the same project area. HFHT supplies the building materials to people on a 10 year revolving loan, indexed to price of cement. To create partnership all family's applications are sent to regional affiliate offices before being forwarded to the national office for approval. then the Family Selection Committee (FSC) review the applications and make home visits to asses the applicant's needs, their ability to repay the loan and their willingness to participate in the program. All new HFHT's houses are built with cement, floors, roofing tiles and either fired or compressed soil or cement blocks. One beneficiary of the HFHT project, Magagala Omer whose mud hut "tembe" fell down and HFHT helped him to replace it with a decent one boasts, " If it rains today you stay dry and carry on sleeping if at night". The target people of the HFHT are low income people or families, especially in the project areas. Majority of the families in the HFHT project areas live in mud or brick houses with dirty floor and thatched roofs. In this situation HFHT encourages bigger houses with space for children to play, a store for harvested crops, a separate kitchen so that it is not always smoky and a stronger house making difficult for thieves to break in. Home owners are only required to contribute local available building materials and unskilled labor, while HFHT provide equipment like cement, timber, nails sand and roofing tiles, and skilled technical labor which families could not normally afford. HFHT charges approximately Tanzanian shillings 500.000/= which is equivalent to US $ 778 for a house. The NGO works and builds houses with people of all nature regardless of their religion, race sex, tribe and standard of education. Most of HFHT funding sources are from the Habitat for Humanity International (HFHIT) with the headquarters based in New York USA which in turn gets money from individuals, churches organization and government donations. The project started it's operations in 1985 and currently covers more than fifteen villages in Tanzania. The process of expansion is continuing in areas such as Kasulu town, the District center in Kigoma Region. Other seven regions established the project include Mwanza, Dodoma (HFHT headquarters.), Tanga Tabora, Mara and Mbeya. Since the project was first erected about 600 decent houses have been built. A National office for Tanzania (HFHT) was established in Dodoma the government capital town in 1994. It is coordinating the four existing affiliate projects and help other projects to start by providing guidelines and policy and information.
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