How to house the world’s fastest-growing population

Shiny cars line the streets of Ngor, a suburb of Dakar. Beside the occasional passing sheep are telltale signs of wealth—ice-cream shops and gyms—that should be enticing to banks offering mortgages. Yet loans are hard to come by. Sam Thianar and his family live in two rooms of the apartment block he is building. The rest he hopes to rent out. Although construction started years ago, the building is a mess of concrete and exposed wires. “When I save a little money, I buy some sand and cement and build a little more,” he says. He applied for a loan of 10m CFA francs ($16,500) from a credit mutual, but was rejected. Nearby Ibrahima Diouf shovels sand to make bricks. Could he ever get a mortgage? “Never, never, never,” he replies.