LAHORE: Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz received the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour in Muscat on Monday for Punjab’s Apni Chhat, Apna Ghar Housing Scheme. It is a real honour and the government has every right to be pleased. But the award and the scheme both deserve a closer look than the official statement gives them.
The Scroll of Honour has been given since 1989 and is UN-Habitat’s highest award for work on housing and cities. The official statement says “only five selected countries” received it this year (2026). That makes it sound rarer than it is. UN-Habitat has named five winners every year since 2018, ideally one from each region of the world.
This year’s other four were Htoo Weng of Myanmar, Thiago Baurmann Gubert of Brazil, Abdelmalek Ghanem of Tunisia and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. A Punjab minister described the scheme as one of the world’s top five affordable housing projects, but the Scroll is not a ranking of housing projects, and the other winners include individuals and a mayor.
Pakistan’s last Scroll came in 2007. It went personally to Lieutenant General Nadeem Ahmed of the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority, for rebuilding after the 2005 earthquake. The government says this is the first time a provincial housing project from Pakistan has been honoured. The selection was announced last month.
The programme was launched in August 2024. It gives interest-free loans of up to Rs1.5 million, repaid over seven years, to families who want to build a house. The first target was 100,000 homes in four and a half years. The chief minister now says more than 200,000 families have their homes and that the aim is 500,000 in five years. By the end of August, Rs243 billion had been given out in loans.
These are large numbers for a scheme that is barely two years old, and speed is what earlier governments lacked. The Naya Pakistan scheme promised five million homes and built only a small part of that.
Before leaving for Muscat, the chief minister dedicated the award to “the homeless people of Punjab”. At the ceremony she dedicated it to the people who have built homes under the programme. These are not the same people.
To get the loan, an applicant must already be the sole owner of a plot, up to five marla in a city or ten marla in a village. A family with no land cannot apply for it. The scheme helps people who had a plot but no money to build on it. That is a real need, but it is different from homelessness.
She also called it “the world’s best low-cost housing project”. The award does not say that.
The loans come from a revolving fund, so new loans depend on old ones being repaid. The figure of 200,000 homes is the government’s own. And the families the chief minister first dedicated the award to, those with no land at all, need a different kind of help from this loan.
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