Nigeria’s Federal Government has presented its Renewed Hope housing public private partnership model to representatives of 36 African countries at the second Forum for PPP Units in Africa in Addis Ababa, where delegates from other states sought detail on replicating it. The programme targets 100,000 housing units under the Renewed Hope Cities programme, delivered as a joint venture between government and private developers.
The financing structure is the presentation. Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission director general Jobson Ewalefoh said the project’s construction cost stands at about 125 million dollars in private sector investment, supported by about 39 million dollars of concessional funding: about 19 million dollars of single digit funding unlocked by the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria and a further 20 million dollars of concessional loans from the Family Homes Fund, with buyers additionally supported by a mortgage fund of about 112 million dollars. The government designates middle income federal civil servants as off-takers, commits to access roads at project sites, negotiated sale prices with the developer and limits purchases to one unit per buyer. Ewalefoh estimated the package cuts the project’s effective cost by about 30 percent.
The context is a lending market in which commercial rates exceed 23 percent, which prices conventional developer finance and mortgages out of middle income reach. Ewalefoh’s argument to the forum was explicit: government does not need to finance housing construction directly if it can crowd in private capital through policy, land and off-taker facilitation.
Nigeria was one of five countries selected to present live projects at the forum, alongside Malawi, Kenya, Djibouti and Cote d’Ivoire, at a meeting co-organised by the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank and the African Legal Support Facility. The commission said lessons from the forum will inform Nigeria’s wider pipeline of social sector PPPs. The model’s delivery test remains unproven in the material presented: no breakdown of units completed, sold or occupied was provided, so the 100,000 unit target is a programme ambition, not an output figure.