DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF HOUSING ALLOCATION SYSTEM (A CASE STUDY OF KWARA STATE POLYTECHNIC, ILORIN)

CHAPTER ONE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1. INTRODUCTION

Housing generally refers to the social problem of ensuring that members of a society have a home to live in, whether it is a house, or some other kind of dwelling, lodging or shelter. Many government sector have a department that deals with housing, such as the United State Department of Housing and Urban Department.

Public Housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local. Social Housing is an umbrella term referring to rental housing which may be owned or managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the two, usually with the aim of providing affordable housing, social housing can also be seen as a potential remedy to housing inequity.

Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin as a case study was established by his Excellency, the then Military Governor of Kwara State, Col. David Bamigboye. The decision to establish the Polytechnic was announced during the launching of the four Year Development plan in 1971.

The College eventually came into existence following the promulgation of Kwara State Edict no. 4 of 1972 (now overtaken by the edict no. 21 of 1984, edict no. 13 of 1987 and edict no, 7 of 1994) as a body empowered by statute “to provide for studies, training research and development of techniques in art and language, applied science, engineering, management and commerce, education as well as in other spheres of learning”.

The Kwara State Polytechnic formally commenced operation in January 1973 with an administrative machinery patterned closely after the existing universities in the country. The polytechnic has as its motto: TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION AND SERVICE

At its inception in 1973, the Polytechnic had 110 students, 11 members of academic staff and 3 senior administrative staff. The institution has now grown into having over 500 teaching and non-teaching staffs and 5,000 students.

And since Housing to man ranks next to food and clothing; and is very important to man and the lacks of it can have diverse effect on him, it can psychologically affect him and can sometimes even reflect on his work.

It is in view of this, that the polytechnic developed and maintained staff quarters all over the Ilorin metropolis. As a matter of policy, the polytechnic allocates these staff quarters to the staffs. Staff Residential Quarters could be identified as housing Estates or based on where they are located.

1.2    STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

There are a lot of problems associated with the existing system

Some of these problems are:

1. Time consuming: The existing system based on the fact that it operates manually consumes too much time of both the applicants and the administrators.

2. Energy consuming: The workers expand much energy when searching for files or information pertaining to an apartment or staff that applied or have already been allocated an apartment.

3. Record gets missing or damaged: Since the records are kept in manual files when all the files don’t hold the records anywhere and as such records get misplaced or missing.

4. Allocation of already allocated apartments: If some records are no longer assessable, apartments that have long been allocated might be allocated again to another person causing problems.

5. General statistics is difficult to get: To get statistics such as total number of senior staff that have been allocated apartments, total number of apartments etc.

6. Poor data security: The files can be stolen or accessed by unauthorized persons as it is not secured by passwords etc.

1.3    SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

The significance of this project is to develop an authorized system that will effectively and efficiently handle all the problems listed above.

This is very important as the importance of housing cannot be over emphasized.

1.4    AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

The aim of this study is to analyze the housing allocation procedure of Kwara State Polytechnic with the view to computerize the process of housing allocation. To achieve this, the study has the following objectives:

1. To look at the existing process of housing allocation;
2. To look at the problems in the documentation of housing allocation data
3. To make a comprehensive solution at solving the problems         (computer based system).

1.5    SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The proposed system is not a universally versatile system. It is limited to the project of the Department of Works and Housing, and this project does not cover the whole activities of the works department, it only covers Estates Management Section which deal with the keeping of records of staff that are in Kwara State Polytechnic Housing Estates.