Affordable Housing in Emerging and Developing Economies: Exploring the Role of Urban Planning and Policy in African Countries

Housing deprivation remains a pressing global challenge in contemporary urban planning and development, particularly in metropolitan areas and large cities, where unaffordability arises when housing costs exceed a household’s financial capacity. Affordable housing – along with related concepts such as low-income housing, public housing, social housing, and subsidized housing – serves as a key government-led solution to mitigate free-market inequalities, enabling low-income and vulnerable groups to access quality housing alongside essential services. Despite growing academic and professional interest in affordable housing, the issue still requires further attention, especially when considering local and contextual conditions. Hence, this study explores affordable housing in emerging and developing economies through the lens of urban planning and policy in African countries. The systematic literature review focuses on a comparative analysis of four distinct approaches in African cities: the state-led rental-sale model in Algiers, Algeria; the facilitated but unaffordable cooperative model in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia; the insurgent prefigurative movement-led model in Cape Town, South Africa; and the informal demand-side adaptation strategies in Lagos, Nigeria. The findings reveal a profound disconnect between top-down policies and on-the-ground realities. The analysis demonstrates that no single, ideologically pure approach is sufficient. Instead, effective strategies must forge a hybrid path that is: (1) empirically grounded in the lived reality and financial capacities of the urban poor; (2) built on an integrated system combining land access with enabling financial mechanisms; (3) reliant on a reimagined state role that moves from rigid provision to responsive partnership; and (4) focused on housing as an act of urbanism, integrating location, services, and liveability. The study concludes that achieving affordable housing in emerging and developing economies including African countries requires a pragmatic, context-sensitive urban planning framework that learns from informal systems, confronts unjust structures, and strategically combines the scale of the state with the agency of its citizens.