Data Agenda for Housing in Africa
We believe market intelligence & data is fundamental market infrastructure for the housing finance sector. A key constraint undermining private sector participation and good policy engagement in affordable housing finance is the availability of data and market intelligence to facilitate risk-taking and decision-making. By providing market intelligence that makes the case for investment in underserved markets, we can support a better policy environment and increased private sector activity in affordable housing markets. In this way, we catalyse scale interventions.
The objective of the Data Agenda is to catalyse the provision and dissemination of this data and to support the development of a community of in-country housing and housing finance practitioners who promote the importance of accurate data and who actively engage with data to generate relevant insights.
Our vision is the development of a housing and housing finance data universe in Africa that provides regulators, policymakers, developers and housing financiers with accurate, relevant and current data.
The Data Agenda for Africa involves five broad components which we are currently pursuing in our priority countries:
- Collect, assess and curate available data (public, private and deal-specific) relevant to increased investment in affordable housing across Africa.
- Identify data gaps that inhibit market activity and close key data gaps by: (a) Encouraging data owners to make existing data available or improve quality /coverage of data they collect; and (b) Commissioning partners to gather additional data (primary data)
- Integrate, optimise and expand our set of knowledge products & data tools to produce a set of key data outputs that are widely used
- Build the capacity of partner institutions to analyse data and engage with data-driven outputs
- Promote the importance of accessible, credible data as a catalyst in the affordable housing market
CAHF is pursuing the Data Agenda for Housing in Africa with our partners, 71point4 and Reall. A presentation by Chris Garbers of 71point4 at the November 2019 AUHF conference sets out the rationale. To begin, we have produced:
- Data Landscape reports for all countries, including a review of legislation and the institutions involved in each country in support of housing data, and action plans for going forward.
- Databases of the 115 Market Shaping Indicators in 2020, for all countries. This will be collected annually and extended to new countries over time. Reall has published these on its dashboard – see www.reall.net/msi
- Country profiles for Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Nigeria and Ghana
- A Market Shaping Indicators Metadata Document providing definitions and data collection recommendations for the 115 Market Shaping Indicators
- A special B40 dashboard using USAID’s Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) database, exploring the housing circumstances of the bottom 40th percentile of the population in ten countries and their major cities.
- An online dashboard which displays the data collected against the Market Shaping Indicators for each country in Africa and thus allows you to explore the availability of the data on the Headline Indicators by country, and for each component of the value chain. These indicators were collected via CAHF’s annual Housing Finance in Africa Yearbook data collection processes.
- A short Data Manifesto, a Data Agenda Strategy, and a Tidy Data Protocol.
Overall, the Data Agenda is supported by CAHF’s core funders, FSDA and AFD. In addition, we have entered into a partnership with Reall to pursue the Data Agenda in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique, and Ghana. In Nigeria, our partnership is with the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC). And of course, we work with AUHF members in their countries as well. We are also grateful to HOFINET for their technical input and partnership. As we broaden and deepen our effort across the continent and down to city level, we invite local, regional, and international organisations to partner with us to support the availability of the data and market analytics necessary to enable increased investment in housing finance across Africa. For more information, please contact Kecia Rust on kecia@housingfinanceafrica.org
