Financing and accessing affordable housing in East African cities

East African cities are urbanising faster than their ability to adequately house their populations. Nairobi, Kigali and Dar es Salaam are among the continent’s fastest-growing urban centres, and in each of them, formal housing supply has failed to keep pace with demand. The result is a familiar pattern across the region: large and expanding unplanned and/or informal settlements, overcrowding, rising land and rental costs, and a widening gap between what housing costs to build and what most urban households can afford to pay.

Across all three contexts, common questions recur: how to make housing finance reach low- and middle-income households rather than only the formally employed; how to secure land and basic infrastructure at a cost that keeps units affordable; how to avoid displacing the very communities these programmes are meant to serve; and how to balance ambitious national targets with realistic, well-governed and secure accessibility. This webinar brings together government agencies, housing finance institutions, urban planners, researchers and civil society from Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania to compare notes on what is working, what is not, and what can be learned across borders.