Les hypothèques boostent la classe moyenne africaine

[José]

In Africa, Mortgages Boost An Emerging Middle Class

By Michael M. Phillips

Herrick Mpuku has spent a decade building his family a house, and it's still not done. There are no kitchen cabinets, and the concrete-block walls haven't been plastered smooth. But now the 45-year-old economist is having a new home built - one he expects to go from groundbreaking to the final coat of paint within six months.

The difference? Mpuku built his first house the traditional African way: In excruciatingly slow stages, he bought the land, had the foundation laid, erected a few feet of wall and finally got a roof installed, whenever he had something left over from his paycheck. This time, he's getting a mortgage.

On a continent known for its desperately poor and obscenely rich, a small middle class is on the rise and beginning to get access to one of the staples of bourgeois life: the home loan.

Mpuku is buying a home in the Lilayi Housing Estate, a novel 3,700-house suburban development that provides a buyer with both a simple new house - more Levittown than McMansion - and the mortgage to buy it.

The World Bank estimates the Sub-Saharan middle class will be 43 million strong by 2030, up from 12.8 million in 2000. Though the bulk of the continent's middle-class consumers are in South Africa, growing markets in such countries as Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana are attracting attention from investors around the world.

Africa's middle-class consumers generally have far less access to housing loans than do their counterparts in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe or some parts of Asia, such as India, according to OPIC [the Overseas Private Investment Corp., a US government agency that is lending mortgage money to the Lilayi project and is investing in home-finance projects in Kenya and Ghana]. And, at least in Zambia, being the pioneer has been painful.

Bureaucratic and legal obstacles have put the Lilayi project a year behind schedule, leaving some would-be customers wary. But Tope Lawani, Nigerian-born co-founder of the private investment firm Helios Investment Partners, says investors are starting to realize that the continent doesn't lack demand for middle-class goods and services, from air travel and electric power to hotel rooms and financial services. What's missing, he says, is companies willing to do business in Africa and create a competitive market to fulfill pent-up middle-class aspirations.

With backing from American and other investors, Helios has put together a $300 million fund aimed at companies that target African middle-class consumers. Among its first investments is a stake in First City Monument Bank in Lagos, which plans to expand its credit-card, consumer-loan and mortgage businesses.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1184610804…ON=wsjie/6month

[Nick de Cusa]

Ma prédiction que nous avons la nouvelle Inde à 3h d'avion vers le Sud se rapproche.