Kuwaiti-funded housing complex for low-income families advances in Hadramout
Yemen Herald News 
Hadramout Governor Salem Ahmed al-Khanbashi, who also sits on Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, praised Kuwait’s humanitarian and development work in the country during a meeting in Mukalla on Monday to finalise arrangements for a Kuwaiti-funded residential complex in Ash-Shihr District.
Al-Khanbashi met representatives of the Abdullah Habishan Foundation for Development and Charitable Works, headed by its executive director, Eng. Salem Habishan, and was briefed on the components of the scheme. According to the state news agency Saba, the project is to deliver between 100 and 150 housing units aimed at needy, destitute and low-income families, together with a number of centres and support services intended to make the complex a functioning neighbourhood rather than a row of shelters.
The governor described the project as important to strengthening humanitarian and development efforts and to providing adequate housing for the most vulnerable, and instructed the relevant authorities to clear any obstacles to implementation and complete the necessary procedures so that construction begins promptly and meets the specified standards. No cost figure or completion date was published.
Shelter is one of the least visible and most persistent needs in Yemen. Millions of people have been displaced during the war, many of them more than once, and a large share live in rented rooms they struggle to pay for, in unfinished buildings, or in informal settlements assembled from salvaged materials. Emergency shelter assistance keeps people out of the open but rarely produces anything durable. Permanent housing, by contrast, gives a family an asset and an address, which in turn affects access to schooling, work and services.
That is why projects of this size matter more than the numbers suggest. A complex of 100 to 150 units will not alter national statistics, but it removes a specific set of families from a cycle of insecure tenancy, and the inclusion of service centres alongside the housing reflects a lesson learned repeatedly in Yemen and elsewhere: housing built without water, sanitation, schooling or transport connections tends to empty out or deteriorate quickly.
Hadramout is Yemen’s largest governorate by area, stretching from the Arabian Sea coast deep into the interior desert, with Mukalla as its capital and Ash-Shihr sitting on the coast to the east. The governorate has been comparatively insulated from the front-line fighting that has defined Marib, Taiz and the Red Sea coast, and its ports and oil infrastructure have given it a degree of economic weight within government-held territory. That relative calm is not the same as prosperity: residents have protested repeatedly over electricity cuts, service failures and the distribution of oil revenues, and the governorate has its own unresolved arguments about local authority and the role of forces stationed there.
Kuwait has been among the more consistent Gulf donors to Yemen. It has funded humanitarian and development projects through both state channels and charitable foundations over many years, and it hosted the extended round of United Nations-mediated Yemeni peace talks in 2016, the longest negotiating process of the war’s early phase. Kuwaiti development finance also supported Yemeni infrastructure well before 2015. Charitable foundations remain a significant vehicle for that support, particularly for housing, water and mosque construction, and they often work through local partners with existing presence in the target district.
Aid delivered through foundations carries both advantages and questions. It can move faster than multilateral programming and reach communities that larger agencies do not prioritise, and it usually produces visible physical results. It is also less standardised in its targeting and reporting than United Nations or World Bank-managed work, which places more weight on the local authority’s oversight, the responsibility al-Khanbashi assigned to officials on Monday when he told them to ensure the project meets specified standards.
The timing sits against a difficult backdrop. Humanitarian funding for Yemen has been contracting, and agencies have been reducing programmes rather than expanding them, at a moment when the security situation elsewhere in the country has deteriorated sharply. Missile strikes have forced the Red Sea port of Mokha to suspend operations, Marib city has been hit by ballistic missiles and drones, and the United Nations Special Envoy has warned that Yemen faces its highest risk of returning to large-scale conflict since the truce agreed in April 2022. Renewed fighting typically generates new displacement, which increases shelter needs faster than any construction programme can meet them.
For the families expected to move into the Ash-Shihr complex, none of that is the immediate point. What matters is whether the units are built, whether the promised services arrive with them, and whether the allocation process reaches the households it is meant to reach. Those are administrative questions, and they are where projects of this kind most often falter.
The Presidential Leadership Council seat al-Khanbashi holds adds a further dimension. The eight-member council was formed in April 2022 to bring the main anti-Houthi factions under one nominal leadership, and its members retain strong regional bases alongside their national roles. A governor who is also a council member can move a local project through central procedures more quickly than one who is not, though the same overlap invites scrutiny of how resources are distributed between governorates.
Al-Khanbashi’s public instruction to remove obstacles suggests the governorate expects some. Construction in Yemen contends with import costs, fuel prices, currency instability and, in some districts, land disputes. Getting from an announced scheme to occupied houses is the harder half of the work.
About the Author
