Building the Information Infrastructure to Support Investment in Affordable Housing Across Africa

Kecia Rust

Facilitator

November 8, 2024 | 13:00 - 14:30

Multipurpose room 13

Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa

South Africa

English

Reference:

NE 13-10

WUF12

Networking Events

Summary

A key constraint undermining private sector participation and good policy engagement in affordable housing is the availability of data and market intelligence to pinpoint the challenges and opportunities, to facilitate risk-taking and to enhance decision-making. Data is critical in the development of any sector. It informs policy decisions by government as well as investment decisions made by private sector participants including funders and developers. In Africa’s affordable housing sector, it is sorely lacking.

Over the past 10 years, the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa has been developing tools that are slowly building the information infrastructure to support investment in affordable housing across Africa. From our flagship publication, the Housing Finance Yearbook, through to our most recent efforts to champion an Open Access Initiative, CAHF has collected, curated, analysed, presented and shared data and market analyses in interesting ways, championing the critical need for thoughtful and well-informed responses to housing challenges. In South Africa, our Citymark programme takes indicators generated from deeds registry data and plots this on maps, highlighting property price performance of the lowest value segment of the property market. In Kenya, our Nairobi Metropolitan Dashboard has collated data from all the developments underway or for sale in the metro, and presented these on a map, providing data on housing construction activity not previously available in this aggregated form. In Nigeria, we have been working with the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company and other stakeholders to use publicly available but under utilized survey data to showcase issues of housing demand and supply. Our housing investment chronicles provide qualitative data on household investment decisions, while the Open Access Initiative works with developers to provide real-time delivery data, offering insights into the build process and all the risks and opportunities associated with particular developments in particular places.

CAHF has pursued its Data Agenda for Africa in partnership with Reall, 71point4, FSD Kenya, FSD Africa Investments, the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company and others. In this session, we will showcase the various tools, products and other resources that CAHF and its partners have developed to support the information infrastructure for affordable housing in Africa, from experience to collection, to analysis, to presentation, to dissemination, to adoption. Participants will learn about the different data tools and how they might be applied in different contexts. They will be invited to comment on the usefulness of the tools and products and make recommendations for different approaches or additions. For participants from Africa, these tools and products are readily available for application. For participants from other regions, they can use the insights to develop their own tools, relevant to their contexts.

Objectives

The primary objective of the session is to foster a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape of housing data in Africa and how to use these resources to address information asymmetries that otherwise undermine investment.
We hope to solicit feedback on the usefulness of the tools etc. that we've developed, so that we can be more targeted in our efforts to make data available in the affordable market.
We especially wish to build awareness and facilitate buy-in around the Open Access Initiative, a flagship project of CAHF's that seeks to work with developers to share their lived experience in the housing construction and management process.
Further, we wish to encourage housing sector stakeholders across the globe to use our tools in support of their work, or if they are in other regions , to adapt and then use it in those contexts.