As adverse weather conditions, and climate-related emergencies reduce and degrade affordable housing stock across continent, members of the African Union for Housing Finance are seeking resilient, safe and adequate housing to improve quality of life of households and reduce environmental impact in the residential construction industry.• Urges govts to adopt sustainable, environmentally friendly housing construction.
According to African Economic Outlook , five of the ten countries most affected by climate shocks in 2019 were in Africa. In 2020 and 2021, there were 131 extreme-weather, climate change-related disasters recorded in Africa. The majority of these were flooded, followed by 16 storms, 14 droughts and two wildfires.
In the declaration, they further called for the incorporation of appropriate and affordable standards for socially and environmentally sustainable housing in policy, regulatory and financial frameworks at national and local level, paying special attention to sustainable infrastructure and land management frameworks.
They pledged to encourage the link between green housing and green financing, with a particular reference to affordable housing in all of its diversity and facilitate discussion in this regard, as well as develop interactive platforms and mechanisms to support members through the creation of opportunities to network, share experiences and learn from one another, on adopting models that support green building, green financing and green living.
Specifically, they encouraged the DFI community to provide affordable green finance to downstream financial institutions to enable them to pass on the affordability to low-income earners, dedicating a larger percentage of their green finance interventions to resilience rather than mitigation for cities/urban areas response to climate change.