Rebuilding Homes

Shelter Now employs local villagers to produce roofing materials for their own houses.

Since the early 1990s and in particular since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, millions of Afghan refugees have returned to their homeland. In many cases they arrived to find their homes and villages in ruins and they lacked the necessary materials to rebuild.

Building the loam walls is not so difficult, but finding suitable materials for the roof is a problem. The typical flat roofs used on Afghan houses are traditionally made of wooden beams, brushwood and loam. Afghanistan once had a huge amount of forest lands, but all that has now changed and good-quality building wood is hard to come by.

Since 1992, Shelter Now has set up six factories for manufacturing roofing systems – beams and panels made of reinforced concrete – along with doors and windows made of steel and glass. Local Afghans are trained at the factories. In order to ensure that a normal Afghan family can afford to build a house, the material is sold very cheaply or sometimes given away for free. Subsidizing the prices ensures that the reconstruction can proceed. So far more than 31,000 houses have been rebuilt using our materials.

In our factories, we train up young people as metalworkers

During the time when our staff were taken hostage in 2001, the Taliban plundered and destroyed all of our factories. It costs around USD $135,000 for us to rebuild and set one of these factories up again. Two of the factories are now operating once again. But there is still a huge need for building material. Even before the destruction, people sometimes had to wait six months for Shelter Now's coveted roofing materials.

In the summer of 2002, we were able to open a new factory north of Kabul. All the concrete sections as well as the doors and windows for the "Sabz Sang" Village of Hope were produced at this site, along with concrete sheeting for a drainage project in Kabul. Since the spring of 2003, the factory has been producing roofing materials for other neighboring villages. And it's not only homes that are being built, but also various community buildings and schools.

An important positive side-effect of the factory is that it provides the opportunity for young men to train as metalworkers. After 6 months they are issued a certificate. Trained workers are in demand in Afghanistan. This means they have a good chance of getting a job afterwards in Kabul.