For most urban Africans, owning anything
other than a slum home is out of reach
Unaffordable houses make
sub-Saharan Africa the world's
smallest mortgage market
L
agos, the congested commercial capital
of Nigeria, has a population variously
estimated at anything from 12m-21m. But
what is certain is that people are moving to the
megacity and its smaller counterparts across
the continent in droves—and not into brand
new flats with recently acquired mortgages.
With around 40% of its people living in
cities, sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s least
urbanised region. But it is changing fast: the
UN predicts that its urban inhabitants will more
than treble in number to 1.1 billion by 2050,
accounting for 56% of the region’s population.
By 2030 Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg and
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FARMERS GAZETTE
November 2015
Luanda will have joined Kinshasa and Lagos as
megacities, each with more than 10m people.
Most of that growth will be in slums, which are
currently doubling in size every 15 years while
they shrink in many other parts of the world.
They’re not always cheap to live in, either.
Economists at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology found that in Kibera, a massive
Nairobi slum, residents devoted almost a third
of their non-food expenditures to rent. More
than 90% of them are tenants. In Kenya’s
countryside, by contrast, 90% of households
pay no rent at all, typically because they built
their own shelter on informally owned land.
Rural migrants who want to take advantage
of the opportunities Africa’s cities have to
offer often have no choice; formal housing is
unaffordable in most countries. The cheapest