Nigeria’s minister for power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, will on Wednesday expose a roadmap on how government intends to close the country’s overwhelming 17 million housing deficits, authorities at the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC) said on Monday.
Fashola will be speaking at the 32nd annual conference of the Africa Union for Housing Finance (AUHF), which begins on Wednesday in Abuja, to particularly explore how to grow Africa’s mortgage markets to provide sustainable access to affordable housing finance as well as public-private partnerships for affordable housing delivery.
At a pre-event press conference in Abuja, Chariles Inyangete, managing director/CEO of NMRC, called housing challenge a global one, but that it was now more like a crisis in Africa.
“The extent of inequality created by the crisis of affordable housing on the African continent is too high a price to pay, and we must find solutions to providing access to sustainable housing finance,” Inyangete stated.
This is now the time for all stakeholders to begin to rethink the way housing had been treated in the past and provide practical solutions to housing in a manner that also tackles the problematic issue of affordability in the country, Inyangete said.
According to Inyangete, the 2016 AUHF conference – the first in Nigeria and to be co-hosted by the NMRC will therefore provide a platform for leading policy makers, practitioners and investors on the African continent and beyond to share, learn from and network with the best in the world on housing finance.
The three-day conference will particularly draw out solutions to affordable housing finance set in the context of the theme – Housing and Africa’s Growth Agenda. Sessions at the event have been designed to reflect a balance between the need to draft policies that will drive sustainable housing finance to the growing ranks of people on the continent.
Inyangete, however, acknowledged that the government was doing quite a lot to address the challenge, announcing that some sets of new guidelines for the sector was being worked out but noted that more still needed to be done.
“There are lots of initiatives that are coming through to particularly address the issue of affordability. But we need to build houses in such a way we would develop vibrant communities. That is where we missed it in the past. We need to build sustainably in a manner that houses are durable,” he said.
He assured that the NMRC as a dominant housing partner in Nigeria has set out to provide liquidity and access to affordable housing in the country, assuring that they are ready to finance mortgages as low as N1.5 million.
Oscar Mgaya, CEO of Tanzania Mortgage Refinance Company/chairman of AUGF, admitted that housing remained a common challenge in Africa because the housing agenda had not been raised and given priority, as it ought to.
He said the conference would therefore get governments thinking on how to work faster to tackle this challenge, leveraging the sector’s multiplier effect to expand economies on the continent.
Keshia Rust, executive director at the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa, also acknowledged that the Nigerian government had been working out some strategies to close the housing gap, and that the whole of Africa would be looking forward to learning from the country’s experience at the conference.
She said the conference would also provide framework on how to develop products and services for low-income earners.
