Accra, Ghana – Ghana needs more than 1.8 million additional housing units, but attracting investment to build them is only half the challenge. For millions of people, the deeper problem is that the homes reaching the market remain beyond their means. That tension ran through the Africa Real Estate Conference & Expo (ARCE), which brought developers, policymakers, investors and technology entrepreneurs to Accra this week.
While participants presented plans to expand construction, improve housing finance and deploy new technologies, their discussions pointed to a stubborn question: how can Ghana make housing commercially viable for developers without pricing out the people who need it? The stakes are considerable. Some 56.7 percent of Ghana’s population lives in urban areas, yet only about 5 percent of Ghanaians can afford housing without state support.
The gap between housing need and effective purchasing power continues to shape the market, limiting the reach of both private developers and conventional mortgage lenders. The government has introduced measures intended to reduce borrowing costs and stimulate construction. The National Homeownership Fund has lowered mortgage rates to 8.4 percent, from 13.5 percent, while a revolving fund of three billion Ghanaian cedis (about $256m) targets public sector workers with repayment periods of 15 to 20 years.
Authorities are also seeking to revive the stalled Saglemi Housing Project, targeting the first 700 units for March 2027, and have announced plans for a 200-acre Green City Project at Dedesua. At the National Conference on Housing Finance earlier this month, President John Dramani Mahama announced an allocation of one billion Ghanaian cedis (about $85m) in the 2027 budget for the National Housing Fund. He also highlighted the difficulties informal-sector workers face in accessing mortgages, despite earning regular incomes, because they often lack payslips and conventional banking records.
Housing Minister Ahmed Ibrahim, who represented the president at ARCE, also called for greater private-sector participation in affordable housing and mortgage finance. These interventions address important barriers, but their impact will depend on whether financing reaches the households most in need and whether developers can build at prices those households can sustain. Lower interest rates cannot compensate indefinitely for expensive land, infrastructure and construction.
About 90 percent of Ghana’s housing is built through personal savings and incremental construction, while mortgage penetration stands at just 0.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The figures point to a market in which most households must finance construction themselves, often over many years, rather than buy completed homes through conventional mortgages. Bako Ambianda, CEO of Backbone Capital Ventures and an ARCE keynote speaker, said the central problem was not a lack of demand but the difficulty of turning that demand into viable housing projects.
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