What Kigali got right on housing as Kenya struggles with public trust

A visitor to Kigali, Rwanda, is always mesmerised by the orderly and clean nature of the city.

From the airport to one’s place of residence, local guides take pleasure in showcasing their city’s strides in improving urban mobility that includes the metropolitan buses whose dedicated lanes are a no-go zone even for the numerous boda boda taxis.

Still, I was taken aback when our driver suggested we visit Kigali’s version of affordable houses a week ago.

Coming from Kenya where the much-touted Affordable Housing Programme has received much backlash, touring the project in Kigali did not initially sound much like a touristic activity. But we obliged and soon got to see why his excitement had become contagious.

Mpazi Rehousing Project in Gitega Sector, Nyarugenge District, is located a few minutes’ walk from the Central Business District.

The now living symbol of the city’s transformation was once a struggling informal settlement with dilapidated homes, poor infrastructure and prone to flooding and landslides.

Situated on a steep hill, Mpazi residents risked life and limb as they battled frequent hazards as evidenced by a collapsed retaining wall about five years ago.

In place of the once-dilapidated walls and rusty roofs now stand rows of red brick housing units in a mix of studio to four-bedroom apartments, co-housing units and integrated commercial spaces.

In Mpazi, residents, in a true Rwandese hospitality style, eagerly welcome guests while children play in a safe environment.

The initiative to rehouse low-income earners living in precarious settlements is led by the City of Kigali with support from the Rwanda Housing Authority, Ministry of Infrastructure, Development Bank of Rwanda and Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC).

Rather than forcing residents to relocate, the settlement was upgraded on-site to ensure communities remained intact with interconnected livelihoods.

How did the project come together? Initially, families living on the land surrendered their pieces to the rehousing programme.

 They were later allocated complete houses according to each family’s previous property values.

Social amenities

In this way, some received more than one house, using the extra allocation as a means to earn income through renting.

 Extra land was set aside for social amenities such as markets, workshops and other local businesses.

“We build homes on land provided by residents, assess the value of their properties, and replace old houses with new ones of equivalent worth,” said Emma Ntirenganya, the director general of Communication and Education at the City of Kigali.

During the handover ceremony in May 2025, 170 families moved into the new homes constructed using clay-fired bricks.

The bricks are locally available, which reduced the construction costs in addition to promoting sustainability. Currently, a total of 793 homes have been handed over to the local community.

Interestingly, surplus homes are either sold or rented at near market rates with the proceeds used to supplement public infrastructure and other social amenities.

“Indicative projections suggest that 25 to 30 per cent of surplus units can be offered below market rates under appropriate financing and management conditions, while annual property value appreciation of 10 to 15 per cent is expected as neighbourhood conditions improve,” states one of the project’s cases studies by Enrico Moriello.

While Rwanda’s affordable housing project seem to be thriving and meeting its prior goals, Kenya’s affordable housing programme initiated by the Kenya Kwanza regime seems to have lost the plot, receiving criticism over its legislation, planning and financing model that requires salaried Kenyans to contribute 1.5 per cent of their gross salaries to the scheme.

To anchor the deductions in the law, Members of Parliament passed a new law called the Affordable Housing Act of 2024, a process the Kenya Human Rights Commission said lacked public participation.

The Bill was signed into law by President William Ruto on March 19, 2024.

Tender processes

Other contentious issues surrounding the programme are what critics term as the opaque nature of the project, planning and construction, with little details in the public domain regarding the tender processes, the amount of money collected so far and expenditure.

“Despite being called affordable housing; the law doesn’t really make housing cheap. It makes it easier for rich people to buy houses while poor people stay homeless, even though they’re forced to help pay for construction of the houses,” KHRC said during the filing of the case surrounding the project.

In Rwanda, the City of Kigali used a blended financing model that included infrastructure grants, concessional debt from Development Bank of Rwanda, public capital and pre-sales or rentals of surplus units, a model that according to Moriello, limited “fiscal exposure and crowding in private capital under public-interest safeguards”.

Residents of Kigali affected by the project were involved in every step of the way and feel ownership of the project. They have also become ambassadors of their city’s urban renewal projects which are earmarked in other densely populated areas.

One of the programmes by the Swiss Cooperation Development Agency (SDC) and implemented by Skat Consulting, sought to engage local community members and key project beneficiaries on project implementation including the architectural designs.

That involvement, according to Kigali city authorities, allayed fears of any underhand dealings and promoted the project as a transparent undertaking.

“We provided houses to those who already owned land and property in the area and were compensated. These individuals received ownership documents for their new homes, allowing them to continue possessing property as they did before,” said Ntirenganya.

And while many interest groups in Kenya have complained of being excluded in the construction material supply chain, young labourers in Rwanda were incorporated early on in the project in pioneering environmentally-friendly technology, especially the supply of clay-based materials for wall cladding.

“These measures are designed to stimulate business opportunities for raw material suppliers, machine workshops, local brick making clusters, planners, masons, real estate developers and authorities, thereby forging a framework for entirely locally supplied urbanisation,” says the UK-based Commonwealth Association of Architects.

Currently, the Mpazi project has attracted local interest groups not only in Rwanda but internationally who study the blended finance model, open home allocation system, and community participatory planning.