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Today, I’m writing about one of Africa’s biggest issues: housing.

Growing up in Lagos — Nigeria’s most-populated city — it’s a problem that’s directly affected me and my friends.

Turns out, it’s also an issue across the continent.

We’ll get into the story shortly, but first, we have something cool to share.

Lagos is Africa’s second-richest city. It’s also home to some of its biggest slums.

Every day, 5,000 people move to Lagos in search of opportunity.

That’s 1.8 million people a year.

Imagine all of Hawaii moving into a city less than half its size every year.

As you’d expect, the city can’t keep up.

Traffic jams are hell and social amenities are breaking down.

The biggest problem of all? Housing.

Want to Feel Broke? Try Renting in Lagos

In “good Lagos neighborhoods”, rent can go toe-to-toe with global cities.

A three-bedroom apartment in Dubai costs around 12,800 AED ($3,500) a month.

In Ikoyi (a high-brow part of Lagos), the same apartment can cost up to ₦4.5 million ($3,700).

You would expect 24/7 power and unclean streets, and floods that turn roads to rivers.

But instead, you get epileptic power, unclean streets,

Still, people keep moving into Lagos.

Because urbanization is at full speed.

But it’s not just Lagos.

Across the continent, cities are exploding.

Look at the numbers:

• Kinshasa grew from 6 million people in 2000 to almost 18 million today.

• Cairo went from 12 million people in 2006 to 23 million in 2020.

• And Kenya’s biggest cities add 500,000 people a year.

By 2050, an extra 900 million people will live in African cities.

They’re all going to need homes.

But today…

Africa can’t house its population

Africa needs 52 million new homes to house its current population.

And the biggest shortages are in the biggest cities:

• Nigeria needs 17 million extra homes.

• Kenya is 2 million homes short.

• And Egypt needs 3.5 million more homes.

But, when people can’t find homes, they cram into slums.

Kibera in Nairobi has between 700,000 and 1 million people living in an area slightly smaller than Central Park in New York.

Makoko (in Lagos) is an old community of wooden houses built on stilts over the polluted Lagos Lagoon.

Around 250,000 people live there, battling unclean water, zero amenities, and extreme poverty.

Sometimes, the government even leaves them out of census counts.

But Africa’s housing shortage is not for shortage of land.

Over 80% of land in Kenya is unbuilt.

And an estimated 70% of Nigeria’s land (the country with the biggest shortage) is unbuilt.

If Africa has a lot of unbuilt land and its cities are still overcrowded, it’s worth asking…

Why can’t Africa build?

Well, there are a few reasons:

1) It’s hard and expensive to get that land

• Over 60% of land in Kenya is unregistered.

• Only 4% of countries in Africa have mapped and registered the private land in their cities.

• And registering a property can cost you more than 7% of its value.

It’s hard to prove ownership without proper records.

And in Lagos, many people can claim the same land, making land disputes common.

2) It takes a village to build a house

When building in other parts of the world, there are existing utilities — power, water, gas — that you can plug into.

In Africa, these utilities don’t always exist.

So developers often have to build the village to build the house.

They need to drill boreholes, provide power, and even security.

And as you can guess, those building costs go up.

3) Mortgages are rare in Africa

Majority of Africans earn small, so they can’t qualify for a home loan.

Only five countries (Angola, South Africa, Cape Verde, Namibia, and Mauritius) have mortgage penetration rates above 10% - compared to 80% in the UK.

And for the Africans rich enough to get a mortgage, they just build houses outright.

The ones who can’t buy or build have to rent.

But if you think that’s the budget-friendly option, think again.

Thanks to the bad housing supply, landlords tend to have all the power.

They can jack up prices and even set unfair terms.

You’d expect that those who can afford to build homes would build more of them for rent.

But African developers don’t care

You’d think African developers would go for the housing shortage, but they don’t.

Why?

• The big money is in luxury apartments, malls, and office buildings.

• Commercial real estate in Africa can spin 20%+ annual returns.

• Only 2.5% of listed real estate funds in Africa focus on residential housing, compared to 25% in other developing markets

Why? Because affordable housing isn’t as profitable.

So while middle-class Africans struggle to find homes, developers are busy building gated estates for the rich.

But can tech show us another way to build more homes?

Let’s print a house

Four years ago, something cool happened in Malawi.

In the quiet Salima district, a brand-new elementary school rose from the ground up—fully built in just 18 hours.

The walls went up in 12 hours.

And six hours later, the roof, windows, and doors were in place.

The next day, students walked through the doors of the world’s first 3D-printed school.

The team behind this feat? A company called 14Trees.

They’d built a special kind of building tech called TectorPrint.

It’s a precise mix of cement and lime that can easily print walls.

Building the walls of a normal-sized bungalow would normally take four days.

With TectorPrint, you could do it in 12 hours.

But 14Tress didn’t just dive right into fixing Africa’s housing problem.

They started smaller—with schools.

And Malawi was the perfect test case.

The country has a classroom shortage of 36,000 units.

With current building tech, fixing that would take 70 years.

But with 3D-printing, it’ll only take ten.

And with the built-up school in Malawi, they had proof this could work across Africa.

Once the school was complete, 14Trees went bigger.

This time, they built an entire neighborhood—printing 10 homes in Kenya’s Mvule Gardens in 2023.

And now, they’re partnering with NGOs across Africa to make building homes faster and cheaper.

You, me, everybody gets a house

Printing one school is good.

Printing a whole neighborhood is awesome.

There’s just one question to ask of 14Trees: can it scale?

If printing homes becomes the norm in African cities, it could change the economics of housing in Africa.

Today, 14Trees can cut down wall-building time for a regular bungalow from 4 days to 12 hours.

This means developers can build eight small houses in the time it’ll take to build one.

What happens when we can print 1,000 homes a day?

Africa could finally have its housing supply match the growth of its cities.

And our housing problem would get its long-needed fix.

What do you think of 14Trees — and how else can we solve Africa’s housing problem?

Let me know your thoughts here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown of This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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