Dominica Set to Hand Over 380 Climate-Resilient Homes by Year End as Housing Fair Raises the Bar

Kingston, Jamaica — 4 June 2025

Dominica’s government has announced that over 380 families are set to receive keys to new climate-resilient homes before the end of 2025, with construction currently under way on 10 active sites across the island. The announcement, made by Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit at a Dominica Labour Party anniversary rally, comes as the island’s Housing Recovery Project has already delivered 1,911 completed homes since its post-Hurricane Maria launch in 2019, reaching 38 per cent of its target of 5,000 resilient homes for Dominicans.

A Housing Fair and a Resilient Building Agenda

The housing delivery announcements follow the first-ever Resilient Housing Fair organised by Dominica’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in late May 2025. The fair brought together construction professionals, housing sector stakeholders, building material suppliers, and prospective homeowners to showcase products and solutions for resilient housing construction on the island. Housing Minister Melissa Poponne-Skerrit described the fair as a key activity under the government’s data and systems programme for resilient housing, designed to foster community engagement, increase awareness of building standards, and create a platform for learning and collaboration.

The initiative reflects Dominica’s distinctive approach to housing policy, which positions climate resilience not as an aspirational extra but as the fundamental specification requirement for all new construction. Since Hurricane Maria devastated the island in September 2017, the government has committed to a target of ensuring that over 90 per cent of Dominica’s housing stock is built or retrofitted to resilient building standards. The Housing Recovery Project, run with World Bank financing and using a beneficiary-driven construction model with 49 local contractors, has been the primary vehicle for this ambition.

Scale of the Delivery

As of mid-2025, 2,900 families had benefited from the Housing Recovery Project. Of the 380-plus homes under active construction across 10 sites, the government anticipates completing and handing over keys before the end of the calendar year. The project has also worked to extend housing delivery to marginalised communities, with the Kalinago Territory consistently featuring in home handover cohorts. A significant proportion of beneficiaries are women, with female-headed households identified as a priority group for housing support throughout the programme.

Beyond the Housing Recovery Project, the government has been actively selling government-owned land across the island at subsidised prices to young professionals in sectors such as teaching, nursing, and law. The Young Professionals programme, operating from sites in Warner and Cotton Hill, is designed to give educated working people a realistic pathway into homeownership by reducing the land cost that typically represents the largest single barrier to first-time buyers in Dominica.

Dominica as a Caribbean Model

Dominica’s post-Maria housing programme is the most developed example in the Caribbean of a government using disaster reconstruction not merely to replace lost stock but to rebuild an entire national housing base to a higher and more resilient specification. The World Bank’s Suranga Kahandawa has noted that the investment in housing sector resilience, including construction in safe locations and pre-emptive strengthening of vulnerable existing homes, is the most important long-term intervention a small island government can make in the face of the climate trajectory the Caribbean is on.

For the region, Dominica’s experience offers both a model and a caution. The model is the integration of resilience as a non-negotiable building standard funded through development partnerships. The caution is the scale of the challenge: even with consistent government commitment and World Bank financing, delivering 5,000 homes to the required standard on a small island takes years, not months, and thousands of families continue to wait.

Source: Dominica News Online, May-June 2025

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