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Africa Housing Crisis To Worsen As More People Move To Cities – Report

Africa Housing Crisis To Worsen As More People Move To Cities – Report

Africa will have to come to terms with a serious housing crisis due to high population growth and more people moving to urban centers, a research conducted by the International Housing Coalition showed.

The survey quoted by Zegabi, showed that people are moving to the cities at unprecedented rates, and Africa will be more urban than rural by 2030. It also revealed that in the next 25 years, African cities will have to accommodate more than 300 million new residents.

despite these increasing number of Africans moving to the cities, the size of people living in slums has reduced over the decades.

In 2010, UN- Habitat reported that slum population in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, had came down from 75 percent of all urban residents in 1990 to 61.9 percent in 2010. In South Africa, the continent’s largest economy, the proportion dropped from 46.2 percent to 28.7 per cent during the same period.

Ghana, Senegal and Uganda have also made steady progress, reducing their slum populations by up to 20 percent, while north African countries such as Egypt, Libya and Morocco have “nearly halved their total number of urban slum dwellers, and Tunisia has eradicated them completely.”

This is seen as a progress in achieving the “cities without slums” Plan.

The major constraints in providing housing and related infrastructure in Africa are said to be, policy and institutional constraints, such as lack of priority to housing, limited role of the private sector, high construction cost, Shortage of land for housing.

Besides that lack of formal sectors of financing in many African countries is hindering the progress of reducing the problem.

It is repeatedly mentioned that if nothing is done regarding the situation, to better manage the inevitable urban growth and to increase the relative “productivity” of its cities, Africa risks becoming even more marginalized in the global economy.