Despite the pains of the coronavirus pandemic, authorities of Family Homes Funds (FHF) says it is looking beyond the traditional equity and debt to enable it to raise capital to build affordable housing for low income earning Nigerians.
The Fund is innovating around raising capital of its own and therefore it is planning, over the next few months, to visit the capital market with infra-credit. It is also planning to raise Sukuk bond close to N50billion to finance some of its programmes. In addition, the Fund will be going to the traditional capital market to raise capital.
“Beyond that, we are raising capital from development finance institutions; we have funding agreements and partnership with Shelter Afrique and a whole range of organizations,” Femi Adewole, the Fund’s MD/CEO, said in Abuja recently.
Adewole noted that a vast majority of Nigerian families have their household income below N100,000 monthly. Such people are only able to afford houses built specifically to address their needs and income level, he said, adding that it is that category of Nigerians that the Fund is providing housing for.
“FHF is specifically targeted at housing solutions for Nigerians who are earning less than N100,000 per month as household income. Our social Rental Housing fund is designed to enable people at the bottom of the housing ladder to enter a home of their choice in the location of their choice with very minimal capital commitment,” he said.
Adewole revealed that, over the last nine months, they have committed about N60 billion to building about 14,000 homes across nine states in the North, East, West, South And North Central geographical zones of the country.
Funding, he said, is critical to actualize the goal of affordable housing and FHF is fashioning out innovative solutions that are result-driven in terms of finance, housing delivery and design standardization for projects it handles.
As a federal government intervention for affordable housing delivery, the Funds has the mandate of delivering 500,000 housing units in five years. Part of that mandate is also to create 1.5 million jobs.
To actualize this along with reducing the cost of housing, Adewole disclosed that the Fund is working with agencies like NBRRI and other major manufacturers of building materials like cement with the aim of achieving at least 35 percent of building inputs being manufactured locally by 2021.
“This will not only support the economy but more significantly it will create jobs and will ensure that we can deliver homes at significantly lower prices than we currently do,” he said.
“What we need now and going forward is bold leadership. We believe that bold leadership creates outcomes, good outcomes create bold results, and bold results change lives. Post Corona virus, we need to be doing a lot of changing of lives of, perhaps, some of the most vulnerable Nigerians that require bold leadership
“Let’s focus on results, let’s focus on numbers. This is what Nigerians want from us. They want to see that homes are being provided and that some of the most vulnerable people have homes over their head,” he added.
