Why the numbers on Kenya's housing shortage are misleading

Frankline Sunday 

President Uhuru Kenyatta views a model of houses to be constructed at Park Road Estate in Ngara under the Affordable Housing Pillar of the Big 4 Agenda. Present are Cabinet Secretaries James Macharia, Henry Rotich and PS Charles Hinga. [Standard]

This has been the question at the centre of the Government’s proposed affordable housing plan that aims to build more than 500,000 new units by 2022 funded by taxpayers.


 Last week, the Reuters news agency reported that the World Bank had approved Sh25 billion in loans to Kenya for affordable housing adding that “Kenya has an estimated Sh200,000 annual housing shortfall expected to rise to 300,000 by 2020.” The figures came from the National Treasury. During the 2018/2019 budget speech, Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich made a case for raising funds to set up the Kenya Mortgage Refinance Corporation, which was finally inaugurated last week. “Access to adequate and affordable housing remains a key concern in Kenya,” said Rotich. “It is estimated that the country’s urban centres face a shortage of 200,000 housing units annually and this shortage will rise to 300,000 units by the year 2020 on current policies.”
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This figure has been used to cite Kenya’s housing shortage for years despite being misleading. Kenya does not have a comprehensive public database of the total number of existing housing units and additional ones built annually and there is no official source for the 200,000 annual deficit figure in housing units. One reference that keeps popping up is the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics 2009 Housing and Population Census that has been relied on by both local and international researchers to cite Kenya’s lack of adequate housing. The 2009 national census put the total number of Kenyans at 38.6 million and the total number of households in the country at 8.7 million, putting the average number of members in each household at 4.4. With Kenya’s population growing by roughly one million each year, this estimate of housing demand is achieved by dividing this figure by the average number of households to arrive at 227,000 housing units. SEE ALSO :MPs want funds released for Sh1.2b road construction
The UN-Habitat cautions against this simplistic calculation. “Calculating housing demand is effectively a projection process,” says the UN office. “In cities and nations where data exists, a basic methodology for projecting housing demand by dwelling type consists of applying the dwelling type propensities reported in a recent census or household and demographic survey.” This means the type of house households choose as their ideal house based on their age and family status is used as a unit to project the housing demand based on anticipated population growth.