Is affordable housing plan trying to solve the wrong problem?

Nanyuki Affordable Housing project is expected to meet the housing demand in the region, on March 22, 2025 [File-Standard]

There is an old story often told in development circles. An international organisation visited a rural community where women walked long distances every day to fetch water. Seeing the obvious hardship, the organisation set out to drill boreholes and connect every household to a water supply main. It was the perfect solution, or so they thought. The community rejected it.

It made sense when an anthropologist spent time in the village and uncovered what the project designers had failed to see. For the women, the daily walk was never just about fetching water; it was their “me” time. The water point was where they found their support system, their therapy session and their opportunity to laugh, complain and simply breathe away from the demands of home. The donors sought to solve the problem they saw, not the one the community lived. In so doing, they created a solution the community wasn't interested in.

Kenya's Affordable Housing Programme reminds me of that story. While some hail it as this administration's biggest success, it may well become the one policy that costs it the public goodwill it so desperately seeks.

Housing is undoubtedly a critical need. Kenya has a housing deficit of more than two million units while formal housing supply remains far below demand. That the government sought to address this challenge is commendable. The real question is whether the architects of the policy understood the problem before prescribing the solution. Today, government reports indicate that more than 277,000 housing units have either been completed or are under construction, with over 600,000 jobs created across the construction value chain.

On jobs alone, the program deserves its flowers. But once we leave the construction site, the conversation becomes a little uncomfortable.

The  Housing Levy remains the single biggest source of public resentment. Millions of employed Kenyans make mandatory monthly contributions whether they intend to own these houses or not. Even worse, contributing to the fund does not guarantee allocation of a unit for those who may wish to acquire one. For many workers, the levy feels more like another compulsory deduction whose personal benefit remains uncertain. And this has informed how they perceive the project.

Then comes the bigger question of who the houses are actually being built for.

When the programme was conceived in 2018, its objective was to slow the growth of informal settlements driven by rapid urbanisation. It made perfect sense. Yet many of the intended beneficiaries struggled to remain in the houses because the cost of living extended far beyond the touted affordable mortgage. What looked like an upgrade on paper disrupted their entire social and economic ecosystem so profoundly that some eventually returned to their previous homes.

Today, many of those celebrating their Boma Yangu allocations are individuals acquiring homes as assets or investments. The mama mboga, the boda boda rider and hawker, the very people whose housing challenges inspired the policy, remain largely absent from those success stories.

There is also the question of geography. These apartment blocks make perfect sense in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and other rapidly growing urban centres. The same cannot automatically be said of many rural counties, where land and house ownership are culturally informed. Insisting that every county must have Affordable Housing projects, regardless of local dynamics, suggests a one-size-fits-all policy that risks creating expensive white elephants.

Perhaps the clearest indication that the Affordable Housing Programme is still searching for its purpose is its expansion into student hostels, markets and other developments before its original mission of addressing the housing deficit has been demonstrably achieved. One cannot help but ask: Was the problem really housing, or was it something much bigger?

Measuring the success of the AFP is not as straightforward as counting houses and jobs created. Government and citizens are measuring different things. While the government counts units under construction and employment opportunities, citizens want to know how many houses have been sold, who is living in them, what value they are getting from their monthly deductions and, perhaps most importantly, when those deductions will come to an end.

Kenyans are not rejecting the idea of decent housing. They are simply trying to understand: Whose problem is this project trying to solve?