What if the Real Challenge of Housing in Africa Isn’t Financing?

By Luc GNACADJA, President of GPS-Development, Former Minister of Environment and Urban Development (Benin), Former Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

A False Problem?

For decades, reports and diagnoses have repeated the same findings: Africa faces a housing deficit estimated at over 56 million units according to the African Development Bank [1]. By 2040, this figure could double if nothing is done to address the continent's demographic and urban growth. At every forum, summit, and strategic paper, the same urgency is echoed: more financing must be mobilized.

Of course, the need for massive investment is real. But this institutional reflex for financing reflects a partial, even biased, view of the problem. It relies on the implicit assumption that the housing deficit stems from a lack of "formal" supply, and that only accelerated production by the state or private developers can fill the gap. Yet in many African cities, the supply exists—it simply isn't visible or, rather, it isn’t recognized.

What if the real challenge of affordable housing in Africa isn’t the lack of financing, but the inability to understand, integrate, and support what residents are already doing to house themselves?

What if, instead of trying to produce housing for them, we started by recognizing what they are already producing—often with limited means but great resilience?

This tension reveals a structural, cultural, and political disconnect between two visions of housing:

• One "top-down," driven by institutions, standards, and real estate products;

• The other "bottom-up," where popular, informal, incremental housing is the norm, not the exception.

This article defends a simple idea: financing can only be effective if it is rooted in reality—in the forms of dwelling already present in our cities. In other words, before financing, we must recognize.

Financing is a Lever, But Within What System?

The discourse around affordable housing in Africa often hinges on a mantra: mobilize more funding. National housing strategies, development banks, donors, and cooperation agencies all agree on closing the financial gap. Tools abound: public housing funds, public-private partnerships (PPPs), microfinance, guarantee mechanisms, demand- or supply-side subsidies, and large-scale economic or social housing projects.

But what system are these funds being applied to? What exactly is being financed, for whom, and according to what criteria of relevance or success?

Because while the issue of financing is often addressed, the system it supports is rarely questioned. Yet injecting more resources into an unsuitable framework guarantees neither true affordability nor social relevance.

Standardized Real Estate Products Poorly Aligned with Real Demand

Most funded housing projects in African countries—often labeled "social housing"—are based on a formal, new, standardized, centralized conception of supply. These units are primarily intended for a formal, banked, salaried middle class with a regular, reportable income. This effectively excludes a large portion of city dwellers whose income is informal, irregular, or shared among extended households.

The result: many so-called "social" housing units remain unsold, under-occupied, or are quickly resold on the secondary market because their price, location, or typology doesn't match the real capacities or preferences of their target populations.

In countries like Cameroon, Senegal, or Côte d’Ivoire, public programs have delivered thousands of housing units... that low-income households couldn't afford. Some were sold to investors or remained vacant for years due to lack of solvent demand.

Financing That Ignores the Already-Built City

These financing approaches prioritize new construction, often on city outskirts, to the detriment of existing urban areas. Yet the majority of Africa’s urban population lives in largely self-built environments. Few financing tools are directed at:

• Upgrading existing informal neighborhoods, which absorbed 90% of urban population growth between 1990 and 2015 (according to the Sahel and West Africa Club/OECD);

• Gradually securing land tenure;

• Improving self-built housing.

Affordable housing finance should not mean only funding ready-to-occupy real estate products but also supporting ongoing housing trajectories that can be reinforced, structured, and improved while preserving existing cultural and economic fabrics.

More Financing, Yes—But to Change What?

This is not to deny the importance of financial resources, but to remind us that they are not an end in themselves. Financing should not reproduce failed logics but instead drive transformation of the existing socioeconomic systems. As long as it isn’t tied to an inclusive vision of the real city, it will continue to entrench the exclusion it claims to remedy.

What We Refuse to See: The Informal Urban Fabric

In African cities, the informal is the norm, not the exception. Yet it continues to be described in stigmatizing terms: "slums," "unplanned zones," "precarious neighborhoods," "illegal settlements." These words obscure the fact that millions of city dwellers have housed themselves, often on unserviced land, outside official procedures, but with ingenuity, tenacity, and a sense of community—and they deserve recognition.

This popular urban fabric is the invisible backbone of our cities: it houses, densifies, animates them, and creates jobs—often within an equally informal economy. And yet it remains outside the scope of public housing policies, as if it did not matter or, worse, should not exist. The city may be built without permits, but not without intelligence; “Apparent disorder, hidden order,” as Emile Aillaud once said.

In metropolises like Abidjan, Cotonou, or Kinshasa, neighborhoods like Yopougon, Agla, or Ngaba didn’t emerge from urban plans but through progressive, often informal, collective land occupation dynamics.

These neighborhoods operate under their own logic:

• Land division through social norms, not administrative allotments;

• Modular self-construction based on incremental financial capacity;

• Basic services often improvised, community-managed.

In Pikine (Dakar suburbs), residents organized roads, sanitation, and negotiated gradual regularization. In Douala, neighborhoods like Bonabéri or Ndogbong, built without formal urban planning, are now fully integrated into the urban and economic fabric.

Not a System Failure, But the System Itself

This is not about romanticizing informality or precarity, but recognizing residents’ ability to build functional, evolving, lived-in environments. It is an invisible asset, a popular urbanity that deserves understanding, support, and accompaniment—not demolition or neglect. Where the state is slow to act and formal markets remain inaccessible or unsuitable, people innovate and build. Their solutions may be incomplete or precarious, but they are grounded, adaptive, and deeply human.

To ignore this is to forgo a crucial lever for thinking and building cities differently. Informality is often framed as something to be corrected or integrated. But in reality, informality is carrying the weight of Africa’s urbanization, while public policies remain slow or focused on a solvent minority.

Recognizing the Informal: A Political and Ethical Act

To ignore this reality is a political choice with consequences:

• It denies millions the right to housing;

• Fuels land speculation and spatial exclusion;

• Channels funding to areas not yet populated instead of improving where people already live.

To recognize the real city is to acknowledge African urban ingenuity, often outside formal frameworks. It lays the groundwork for fairer urban development that supports what already works, instead of bulldozing it or replacing it with bank-financed models that don’t reach the poor.

Providing Shelter is a Political Act

Behind every cement block laid without a permit, every room added to a tin house, every footpath turned community road lies an act of dwelling that is political. Habiting is not merely occupying space—it is claiming a place in the city, contributing to its creation, memory, and vitality.

Yet housing policies remain technical, equipment-focused, based on affordability as a simple equation: purchase price / income. But this ignores tenure security, access to networks and services, economic proximity, and a sense of legitimacy in the city.

Affordable on Paper, Inaccessible in Reality

Many "affordable" housing projects are socially inaccessible:

• Too expensive for informal incomes;

• Too far from work or school;

• Incompatible with real family structures (extended, multigenerational);

• Disconnected from social networks and cultural practices.

The paradox: housing built without inhabitants, and inhabitants without recognized housing.

Toward a New Understanding of Affordability

Affordability must be redefined through multi-dimensional criteria:

• Land affordability: securing land access via evolving rights, customary recognition, or occupancy permits;

• Cultural affordability: respecting local housing practices, spatial uses, family norms;

• Spatial affordability: ensuring proximity to services, transport, economic opportunity;

• Evolving affordability: enabling housing to adapt over time via modular, incremental design.

This shift means seeing residents not as passive beneficiaries, but as competent actors capable of adapting, co-designing, and co-building their environment.

Endogenous, Inclusive, Contextual Densification

This calls for a new dialogue on shared territorial living. One example: Cape Town's Mtshini Wam "Reblocking" project, where residents restructured their shelters in clusters, with support from SDI and CORC, creating paths, safety, and shared amenities, while retaining land rights. The city later adopted it as official policy.

We Fund What We Choose to See

If informality is viewed as a problem, we fund its removal. If seen as a resource, we fund its improvement. Popular housing is not urban residue—it is the foundation of the contemporary African city.

Toward a Renewed Urban Pact with the Builders of the Informal

If most housing is produced outside the formal sector, the question is not how to produce more, but how to improve and support what exists. This requires:

1. Rethinking affordability based on real trajectories (incremental building, shared housing);

2. Funding transformation of the existing (upgrades, basic infrastructure, land security);

3. Placing residents at the center of decision-making, as in Thailand’s CODI model (collective loans, co-governance).

Changing the pact means changing allies: recognizing residents as partners, not obstacles. Affordable housing will only be truly impactful if it includes those who already build the city.

Sometimes, Recognizing Is More Powerful Than Blindly Financing

The urgency of affordable housing is undeniable. But the way it is treated must change. Residents aren’t waiting: they are already building the city. What is missing isn’t money—it is a just gaze.

That gaze sees value in popular practices of inhabiting, and affordability as something built at the intersection of social, economic, and territorial realities.

It is time for public officials, planners, donors, training centers, and communities to change paradigms and build a new pact: one of recognition, co-production, and shared improvement.

Recognize to act better. Support rather than replace. Shift from prescribed housing to co-constructed habitats. That is the real breakthrough.

Because in the end, what holds back ambition is not lack of financing, but what we choose to finance—and what we still refuse to see.

[1] This estimate by the African Development Bank (2022) primarily includes the deficit in formal housing—that is, housing that meets official standards of safety, sanitation, size, and land tenure security. It therefore falls short of the actual deficit, which also encompasses existing but inadequate housing (due to poor materials, overcrowding, or insecure tenure), housing in need of rehabilitation, and the needs arising from future demographic growth. The deficit, both quantitative and qualitative, is thus much larger... and difficult to measure accurately.

This English translation was prepared with the assistance of ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI, based on the original French article published in May 2025 on the AdP – Villes en Développement bulletin website.