> By a Correspondent
Samuel Mayimona, a resident of the DR Congo capital city Kinshasa, looks at his still-to-be built three-bedroom house on his 57th birthday and wonders whether he will be able to finish it before he dies.
While waiting for that house to be ‘born’, he and his five children are renting a two-piece makeshift house in one of the impoverished townships of the rundown capital.
“It has been two years since I have started building this house but I’m not sure if it will be finished on time to leave it as heritage to my children and grand-children,” he said emotionally.
Savings and remittances
Mayimona, a civil servant who earns about US$170 monthly, has been using his little savings together with remittances sent by his son from France, to make his dream home come true.
But he said the building stopped last year when he was told by his son that he could no longer afford to send money every month due to Europe’s dire economic situation.
Building materials cost an arm and a leg in this mineral-rich Central African nation, where the UN says over 63% of people live in extreme poverty. One bag of cement is said to cost between US$12 and US$15.
Same song everywhere
Two streets across his house a six-floor building stands tall and proud, as if mocking Mayimona’s foetus-house. Sources said the state-of-the-art building, which allegedly belongs to one ‘corrupt’ politician of the DRC ruling party PPRD, was completed within six months,
Further down to South Africa, Jackie Mofokeng is having the same problem. Her house is almost done but it has yet to be roofed. “I have been building it slowly but surely for the past five years, using my little savings and money sent abroad by my daughter,” the 61-year-old woman said.
“Now roofing it the way I like it is a big problem as I have run out of financial resources,” she added.
Samson Emmanuel, a Nigerian man living and working in South Africa, said he only finished building his house last year after four years of financial struggle.
“From the small money I make here, I was sending bit by bit to my father to pay the construction workers and purchase building material, which is very expensive in Nigeria.
Hopeless MFIs
While Baloyi says he never tried approaching banks or micro-finance institutions (MFIs) on his uncle’s advice as he feels they are useless, Mayimona claims housing finance is non-existent in the DRC, a country where the financial market is said to be underdeveloped and seriously disorganised.
“They are only there for the rich and for the people who can satisfy their sophisticated conditions, not for people like us,” Baloyi said.
“DRC micro-finance institutions only provide rare funds to small businesses,” Mayimona claimed, adding that banks that he contacted to get a loan to finish the house unanimously said ‘no thank you’.
In a continent where 200 million people are living in slums, and 76% out of the 1.1 billion living in cities’ slums, it is no wonder why MFIs across Africa are said to be in a sorry state and are not really playing their pivotal role as ordinary people’s financial helpers.
In Zambia, for example, the microfinance sector has a relatively small footprint. “MFIs had only approximately 100 000 clients in 2012, and focused primarily in and around Zambia’s two urban centres, Lusaka and Copper Belt,” Prof Daniel Apton Phiri, research fellow and lecturer at the Copperbelt University, said.
Mortgage? Never heard of it
In Africa, the world’s highly urbanised continent, affordable housing is still a myth, and many consumers and households said they have never heard of the word mortgage. And some say if such market indeed exists, where in the world it has being trading all these years.
“Mortgage market? What is mortgage anyway? I have never heard of such vocabulary or market since I was born. Where is it?” asked Zimbabwe-born Mary Ndlovu, who has been building her house herself since 2013.
Africa’s mortgage market is said to be non-existent, with South Africa leading the continent with 32% penetration rate and Nigeria languishing at the bottom list with 0.4%, a far cry compared to the United States’ 73%, Dr Chii Akporji, director of policy, strategy and partnerships, at the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC), said.
Despite challenges, the Zambian residential mortgage market has been growing steadily, Prof Phiri said. “Loan portfolio for all Building Societies was US$287 million in July 2014, up from US$57 million in 2013 and US$241.6 million in 2012,” the Kitwe-based lecturer said.
Africa’s housing market challenges
Johannesburg-based African Union for Housing Finance (AUHF) and the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance (CAHF) have both listed the following constraints, among others, to housing development in Africa:
· High cost of building material: it makes it difficult
to build homes at an
affordable price for the
majority of households
· Cost and lengthy time of
land registration
· High cost of financing
· Lack of long term funding
· Poor infrastructure
· Lack of strong government
regulation
· Lack of access to finance
for poor and lower-middle-
income families, as well as
real estate developers
· Unsecured land tenure
and weak land governance,
which inhibits the active
participation of the private
sector
· Inability to provide
infrastructure and lack
of human and institutional
capacity across the
housing delivery value
chain
Some of African countries’ annual housing backlog:
South Africa (pop. 53mn): 3 million units, 1.5 million households live in slums
Zambia (pop. 15mn): 1.5 million units, 3.3 million units by 2030;
Namibia (pop. 2.3 mn): 100 000 units
Zimbabwe (pop.14.2mn): 1.25 million units
Cameroon (pop. 25mn): 700 000 units
Ivory Coast (pop. 20.3mn): 700 000 units
Nigeria (pop. 173.6mn): 17 million units
Angola (pop. 21.5mn): 1.9 million
Ethiopia (pop. 94.1mn): 1 million units
Uganda (pop. 37.6mn): 233 000 units
Kenya (pop. 44.4mn): 2 million units τ
Source: southernafrican
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