The Federal Government has presented a housing delivery model that mobilises $125 million in private investment without direct funding of construction to African countries, even as Nigeria’s own housing shortage remains unresolved.
The model, presented by Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission Director-General Jobson Ewalefoh at a continental forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, targets 100,000 housing units under the Renewed Hope Cities programme. Delegates from 36 countries attended the forum, where Nigeria was one of five countries selected to present projects alongside Malawi, Kenya, Djibouti and Côte d’Ivoire.
The structure differs from conventional public-private partnerships. Under the arrangement, the private partner owns the land, designs the project, finances it and builds it. The government’s role is to de-risk the investment rather than fund construction.
Ewalefoh said the arrangement was designed around a financing constraint that has long hobbled housing delivery in Nigeria: commercial lending rates that exceed 23 per cent. At that cost of capital, developers cannot build at prices ordinary Nigerians can afford, and buyers cannot access mortgages at rates they can repay.
The government deployed three measures to change the arithmetic. It identified middle-income federal civil servants as guaranteed off-takers, committed to building access roads to semi-urban project sites, and unlocked concessional financing through public institutions. The Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria provided about $19 million in single-digit interest funding. The Family Homes Fund added $20 million in concessionary loans. A further $112 million from the MOFI Real Estate Investment Fund is expected to support lower mortgage rates for buyers.
The combined interventions, according to the ICRC, reduced the effective cost of the project by about 30 per cent. About $39 million in concessionary funding is helping to unlock a project whose construction cost stands at roughly $125 million in private investment. The government also negotiated sale prices with the developer and restricted each buyer to one unit to discourage speculation.
The figures place the model within a much larger problem. Nigeria’s housing deficit is officially estimated at 14.925 million units by the National Housing Data Technical Committee, but the Federal Mortgage Bank and industry analysts put the effective shortfall closer to 28 million units once overcrowding and substandard housing are counted. The BusinessDay Intelligence Unit has estimated that closing the gap would require about N21 trillion.
The Renewed Hope Cities programme itself is still at an early stage. The 3,112-unit Karsana project in Abuja is the flagship, with more than 3,000 homes flagged off. A 2,000-unit city in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, is at an advanced stage. The government says more than 15,000 homes are under construction nationwide, a fraction of the 100,000-unit target.
Mortgage access remains the binding constraint. The MOFI Real Estate Investment Fund now offers fixed-rate mortgages at 9.75 per cent over up to 20 years, with a minimum 10 per cent equity contribution, a significant improvement on commercial rates but still beyond the reach of most households earning the N70,000 monthly minimum wage.
Kenya, which presented at the same forum, is pursuing 500,000 housing units through a blended-finance model against a deficit exceeding two million units. The comparison is useful because it shows that the challenge is continental, not uniquely Nigerian, and that no African government has yet demonstrated a pathway to closing the gap at scale.
Ewalefoh told the forum that governments do not need to finance housing capital projects. They can crowd in private capital through policy, land availability and off-taker facilitation. That argument is sound in principle. Whether it can deliver homes at a pace that matches Nigeria’s demographic growth is a question the 100,000-unit target alone will not answer.
The model’s value to other African countries will depend on whether Nigeria can demonstrate delivery, not just design. For now, the $125 million figure is a marker of what private capital can be persuaded to do when risk is shared. The deficit, and the millions of Nigerians living in it, remains the harder test.