Rethinking housing policies to make room for 700 million new urbanites

Africa is urbanising at an unprecedented rate. By 2050, an additional 700 million people will live in African cities. As people create households or move to cities, they need homes—yet today, the continent already faces a massive housing gap. While governments report national housing backlog figures (in 2022 alone, Nigeria faced a shortage of 17 million units, Angola nearly 2 million, and both Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire over 700 000 (UMDF/AfDB, 2022)) the pressure is felt at the city level. City governments are effectively the gate keepers of adequate housing, with central roles in land assembly, servicing, building inspections, service delivery and urban management. With the pressure of urbanisation, however, they struggle to fulfil this role at the scale required. And without adequate housing, cities cannot function efficiently or equitably. Rather, informal settlements expand, urban sprawl intensifies, and cities lose both tax revenue and economic potential. Despite recognition of the housing crisis, the current pace and scale of formal housing delivery is falling far short of what’s required. The problem is systemic: from policy frameworks to market inefficiencies, from unsuitable architectural models to the mismatch between material supply and local demand. Added to this, the formal housing that is built often follows imported templates, disconnected from local family structures and affordability thresholds. Meanwhile, low-income households seek to resolve their housing needs incrementally, step by step, with whatever resources, financial and other, that they can find. While this approach includes many inefficiencies and inadequacies, there is also something to be learned from the effort, which engages absolutely with affordability thresholds, and is nevertheless the dominant actual housing supply on the continent. This webinar is jointly organised by the Sahel and West Africa Club (OECD/SWAC) , the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF) and the African Union for Housing Finance, as part of the promotion of the report "Africa's Urbanisation Dynamics 2025: Planning for Urban Expansion" (https//oe.cd/AUD2025). It is the third in a webinar series bringing together experts and policymakers to discuss specific, urgent, and interrelated aspects of sustainable urban development, following sessions on land governance and urban financing. This event focuses on housing, a cornerstone for inclusive, resilient, and planned urban expansion.