Pierre Béland did a lot of work on tags for highways in Africa.  

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_Tag_Africa

Please read the section on residential and service tags.

What you've changed will probably stay the same for fifteen years and the problem comes with routing software.  Can a nurse use these to cycle to give out vaccinations etc?  service has no connecting function so the software may decide not to use it.

Did you changeset comment the highways and did the other mappers agree with your logic before making the changes?

highway=path or residential works, one difference is do the buildings have a metal roof?  If they do then the consensus is in order to get it there it must be a residential rather than a path.

John