Togo and Shelter-Afrique partner to build 3,000 low-cost housing units in Lomé

Infrastructure

Tuesday, 02 March 2021 18:36

Togo and Shelter-Afrique partner to build 3,000 low-cost housing units in Lomé

(Togo First) - Shelter-Afrique and the Togolese government will build 3,000 low-cost housing units in Lomé. This is in a context where the housing deficit in the Togolese capital surged over the past decade, due to population growth and accelerated urbanization.

The project will be developed under a public-private partnership (PPP). The related agreement was recently inked in Nairobi, Kenya, by both parties involved.

This initiative lines up with Lomé’s ambition to build 20,000 social housing units by 2022, a deadline that was extended to 2025 due to Covid-19.

In detail, Shelter-Afrique, a pan-African finance institution, committed to partially finance the project and, as lead arranger, mobilize other investors to secure the remaining amount. For its part, the Togolese government will provide the needed land, infrastructure, and tax incentives for its smooth realization.

Through this major PPP, Lomé reaches a new milestone in its social housing program - one of the key components of the National Development Plan (PND).

“The Memorandum of Understanding we just signed with Shelter-Afrique marks a new stage in our partnership and it will be crucial to reach our housing target for 2025,” said Koffi Tsolenyanu, Togo’s Minister of Urbanism, Housing and Land Reform.

Commenting on the development, Shelter Afrique said it intends to use the Togolese PPP model as a springboard to expand its investments and interventions in the social housing sector, in Africa. This, the firm added, is in a context where the continent is said to record a housing shortage of 56 million units, 90% of which fall under the affordable housing category.

In Togo, the latest data shows that the government has built more than 20,000 housing units since 2005. In 2018, the National Social Security Fund (CNSS), which provides medium and high-end housing, launched a vast project to build 599 housing units called Résidence Renaissance. The total cost for the project is estimated at more than 91 billion FCFA.

Fiacre E. Kakpo

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