Financialisation and financing urban development: The potential and limits of domestic financial assets

Much of the current discourse on housing finance in the Global South is fixated on attracting international capital -yet a vast and largely underleveraged resource exists much closer to home in the form of domestic financial assets: pension funds, insurance companies, provident funds, and local asset managers with long investment horizons and a structural interest in stable, long-term returns. This lecture examines the potential -and the limits -of mobilizing these assets for affordable housing investment in African cities, drawing on research from University College London and applied experience across the continent. It investigates the regulatory, institutional, and political conditions that have so far prevented domestic capital from flowing into affordable housing at scale, and what would need to change to unlock it. The central question is not whether the money exists -it does -but who controls the terms on which it is deployed, and in whose interests.