One of the most essential needs of people everywhere in the world is adequate housing. This is recognized by the United Nations and is emphasized in its Istanbul Charter. Thus governments are encouraged to facilitate their citizens’ acquisition of Adequate shelter. This involves: protecting the rights of owners and tenants; ensuring that citizens of all classes have the opportunity to obtain satisfactory housing; and inducing the private sector to invest in this economic sector (thereby reducing government expenditure as well as overall costs of housing Despite considerable progress has been achieved in Egypt in the past two decades in policy formulation, facilitating a shift of the public sector’s role to the strengthening of enabling strategies and focusing on the utilization of the potential and capacity of informal sectors, there is a widening gap between policy formulation and the implementation process, and the status of low-income housing delivery is far beyond being satisfactory. There are many constraints for this situation.

The lack of effective implementation strategies, poor promotion of security of tenure, inadequate supply of affordable land and infrastructure, the inadequacy of housing finance systems, poor utilization of local building materials and technologies, lack of support to small-scale construction activities, inappropriate standards and legislation, inadequate participation of communities in shelter development process and support to self-help, lack of focused research and experimental projects, poor utilization of research findings, are amongst such major constraints.