From Cornelius Essen, Abuja.

Experts in the built environment have put in place measures to drive home the adoption of cooperative financing to fund social housing projects, especially for low- and middle-income earners who are largely excluded from conventional mortgages in Nigeria.

They also said that cooperative societies can become one of the most practical ways for Nigerians to construct houses, explaining that this matters because Nigeria’s formal mortgage penetration remains very low compared with housing demand in the country.

Speaking at the Cooperative Housing Summit Africa (CHOSA), Prof.T.Nubi of the University of Lagos, said that there are factors that would catalyse adequate housing delivery, saying, “In reality, many Nigerians already build houses through collective self-help.”

He added that cooperatives are increasingly important in housing finance in the country as they would solve the affordability problem, explaining that the commercial mortgage systems in Nigeria remain difficult for ordinary workers because of high interest rates.

The Convener, Dr. S.K. Yemi Adelakun, called for unflinching support for cooperative housing financing, and overall development, aimed at promoting and delivering decent and affordable housing at scale to low-and medium -income earners.

According to Adelakun, we seek to establish a digital housing finance platform for capital aggregation, impact investment, transparency, and improved financial inclusion for those presently excluded from the formal mortgage system.

“We’ll see cooperative societies becoming one of Nigeria’s strongest housing finance alternatives over the next decade — not because they are perfect, but because they fit Nigerian economic realities better than traditional mortgages.”

He therefore maintained that financiers are looking for homebuyers to fund, insurance companies offering competitive group rates for life and general insurance products, and financially robust cooperatives seeking affordable housing options for their members.

Also, the President of the Cooperative Federation of Nigeria, Mrs. Mershak Hannatu, hinted that they have over 30 million members needing advocacy for them to pool resources together to key into an affordable housing scheme.

*”For many Nigerians, especially civil servants, traders, artisans, and young workers, cooperative housing may prove more realistic than waiting for a fully efficient mortgage market to emerge.”