Evaluating Kenya Housing Performance

General elections will take place in Kenya in August 2022. It is therefore time to have a look at the country achievements during the last five years.

Launched in December 2017, the “Big Four” Agenda was the Government's set of priority programmes to be implemented from 2018 to 2022. The Big Four included food security, affordable housing, manufacturing and affordable healthcare for all. Under “affordable housing” the provision of 500,000 units with government support was envisaged.

Due to different obstacles, particularly the Covid-19 pandemic, this objective has not been met. In fact less than 5,000 units (1 % of the plan) have benefitted from public subsidies.

In the meantime, according to official data (i.e. WUP 2018) the population of Kenya has increased from 50m to 56m and the urban population from 13m to 16m between 2017 and 2022. With an urban growth of 4% per year, the urban population increases by 600,000 inhabitants each year which requires at least 100,000 additional housing units annually. This figure is consistent with the Big Four’s goal, provided we forget rural areas where self-help has been practiced for decades.

The good news is that these 100,000 units have indeed been produced! They have been built by the private sector, in majority by the informal sector but also by formal developers and contractors and by mixed formal-informal investors. This is the miracle of African urbanization, documented in a number of studies. Of course to be affordable many of these new units have to be located in extended or densified slums. Unfortunately in spite of the (defunct?) Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) launched in 2004 by the GoK in collaboration with UN-Habitat, very few slums have so far benefitted from serious upgrading schemes. Such schemes are extremely difficult to design and implement and therefore require strong political will at all levels. Basically, as in most African cities, the urban poor have to take care of themselves.

Another good news is that middle-class housing programmes have witnessed a rapid expansion at the periphery of large agglomerations (not only Nairobi), thanks to dynamic private entrepreneurs (developers and construction companies). An interesting example is offered by our former senior colleague Joe Mungai, who created his own real estate development company after retiring from UN-Habitat. At the moment he is completing a project in Nakuru (called Nakuru Meadows). 70 units have been delivered so far, selling at Ksh 9 million (US$ 78,000) per unit, affordable to households in the Ksh 100,000 to 200,000 monthly income bracket.

A major hurdle faced by housing policies around the world is the cost of urban land. With a proper land policy it would certainly be possible to provide low-cost housing units in Kenya for Ksh 3 million per unit, affordable by all households with monthly income above Ksh 50,000. Families below this threshold would remain tenants as housing alone can’t solve employment and income disparities. Indeed tenancy is a good tenure option in most developed countries (not only for low-income people) where it often benefits from governmental support.  In Kenya tenants represent the vast majority of urban dwellers [1] but they are ignored by public policies.

A final good news is that the lack of public housing policy over the last 5 years has been “compensated” by important infrastructure development programmes aiming at improving transport and urban mobility. The Nairobi Expressway, soon to be completed, is a case in point but many other projects are on-going in the country. These investments have been possible thanks to heavy borrowing from external partners, in particular from China. Debt repayment (and renegotiation) is becoming a serious challenge for the Government but infrastructure, as the most powerful engine of economic development, should remain a top priority in the forthcoming 5-year term. Hopefully future infrastructure development could be guided by a new mobility policy focusing on public transport (BRT, tramway, bus) rather than on private cars. This is essential to combat increasing urban congestion and also to reduce overall energy consumption.

Daniel Biau

8 April 2022

[1] In the slums of Nairobi, monthly rents vary from Ksh 3,000 to 10,000 (US$ 25 to 90 ) according to the accommodation quality.