Lagos turns to private sector to tackle 3.4m housing deficit

The Lagos State Government has said it will increasingly rely on structured public-private partnerships to tackle the state’s 3.4-million-unit housing deficit and infrastructure gap.

The Commissioner for Commerce, Cooperatives, Trade and Investment, Folashade Ambrose-Medebem, disclosed this at the Julius Berger Luminary Soirée 2026 in Lagos, saying the scale of the housing shortfall presented both a major social challenge and a significant investment opportunity.

Ambrose-Medebem said Lagos would need about 227,576 additional housing units annually to address the deficit, requiring roughly N6tn in capital investment every year.

She also disclosed that the state’s property price-to-income ratio stood at 19.2 times, far above the five-times benchmark at which housing is considered severely unaffordable.

The commissioner said the figures underscored the limitations of government spending alone in meeting Lagos’ infrastructure and housing needs.

She described the deficit as “both the sharpest social challenge and the single largest commercial opportunity in the Nigerian economy”, arguing that structured partnerships with private investors would be necessary to close the gap.

Ambrose-Medebem said the state’s 2026 budget provided N4.444tn, including N2.338tn for capital expenditure, with N1.467tn earmarked for infrastructure.

She said the government was nevertheless pursuing a longer-term development framework through the Lagos State Development Plan 2052, which focuses on a thriving economy, a human-centric city, modern infrastructure and effective governance.

The plan, she said, contained 447 initiatives across 21 strategic sectors and was being tracked through a digital delivery platform.

According to the commissioner, Lagos was targeting an expansion of its economy to between $800bn and $4.8tn, while seeking to raise its liveability score from 31.2 to 55 and increase electricity generation capacity to 12 gigawatts.

She said manufacturing contributed 9.57 per cent to the state’s real GDP in the first quarter of 2026, growing by 3.29 per cent year-on-year, against the 10.2 per cent target contained in the Lagos State Industrial Policy.

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Ambrose-Medebem also disclosed that her ministry had attracted more than N50bn in investments within a year, including a N38bn commitment by Twinings Ovaltine Nigeria Limited for its first production facility in Africa in Lagos.

She said the investment was expected to create 112 direct jobs, support a distributor network of more than 200 businesses and generate export opportunities worth more than $8m in West African markets.

The commissioner said Lagos’ reforms had also qualified the state for the World Bank-supported State Action on Business Enabling Reforms programme.

She further cited the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund as part of the government’s efforts to expand access to finance, saying more than N15bn had been disbursed to 20,000 enterprises since 2016.

According to her, the funding had created more than 320,000 direct and indirect jobs and preserved another 173,000 jobs, with a repayment rate of 94.53 per cent.

She added that the LASMECO scheme, implemented with the Bank of Industry and Sterling Bank, would provide loans of up to N10m at nine per cent interest without collateral and was expected to create at least 10,000 jobs.

Ambrose-Medebem also pointed to emerging economic corridors in Epe, Badagry and Ikorodu, citing industrial developments in those areas as evidence of the changing geography of economic activity in Lagos.

Earlier, the Managing Director of Julius Berger Nigeria Plc, Peer Lubasch, said the city’s continued growth would depend less on its potential than on the quality and speed of execution.

Lubasch said Lagos’ traditional economic centre was shifting eastwards along the Lekki-Epe axis, northwards along the Lagos-Ibadan corridor and westwards as connectivity improved.

He said the central question for Lagos was therefore no longer whether the city would expand, but where its durable economic growth would be concentrated.