The state of Africa’s housing sectors has been well captured in a relatively recent AfDB book5 setting out the breadth of issues that together shape market sector performance and housing outcomes for the inhabitants of African cities and towns.
HOUSING FINANCE IN AFRICA
CAHF’s Housing Finance in Africa Yearbook6 , published each November, provides up-to-date commentary on housing market dynamics in each of the continent’s 54 countries, focusing on the overall economic context, access to finance, affordability, housing supply, property markets, the policy and legislative environment, and market opportunities. Throughout the year, conferences and webinars, meetings and site visits are held to interrogate the blockages that make the delivery of affordable housing so elusive. Housing sector professionals grapple with niche market challenges that are framed by the big picture, while pursuing innovative interventions in new sub-sectors – notably the PropTech industry. This section briefly summarises and comments on how housing sector practitioners today understand the problem statement – why do the housing sectors across Africa’s 54 countries not deliver to the requirements of their populations? Why do informal settlements or slums persist? Why is housing so expensive, and why is it so difficult to mobilise the capital necessary to support working housing finance systems and productive property markets? These and other questions are explored in the sections that follow. 2.1 Understanding housing backlogs The notion of housing backlogs predominates descriptions of Africa’s housing challenge. Taking into consideration existing statistics as maintained by national governments across the continent, and the urbanisation rate in 2000- 2015, Bah et al (2018) estimate a continental backlog of 50,5 million homes. From a list in which Botswana and Tunisia have backlog figures of zero, most countries are bearing backlogs of around one million, and Nigeria comes out on top with an impossible backlog as stated in 2018 of 17 million homes7 .
STATE of GOVERNANCE
The State of Urban Governance in Africa Taken together, this data is often used as a proxy for the number of houses that need to be built. Delivery calculations then take this backlog figure, add to it the number of new households created annually through population growth, and subtract from it the number of formal houses delivered by the private sector and the state, and this gives an indication of whether the backlog will grow or (however slowly) decline. The SDG definition of slums offers an opportunity for a more nuanced approach, however. For example, just looking at the percentage of the bottom 40th percentile of the urban population living in Nigeria, Cameroon and Zambia, virtually all households are living in inadequate conditions as per the SDG 11 definition. Figure 1 Inadequate housing among the bottom 40th percentile in urban Nigeria, Cameroon & Zambia (2018) Notes: a dwelling is considered informal if one of the materials used in its construction is not finished. Households without access to flush sanitation have no waterborne sewage disposal. A dwelling is overcrowded if the number of members per sleeping room exceeds two.
CONCLUSION
In other countries, where more than fifty percent of the urban population might afford a $8040 house, there is still a significant percentage of the population that cannot. And indeed, that $8040 is fictional – it is not available across the continent and certainly not at the scale required.
