Amid Africa’s headlong urbanization, the housing challenge is increasingly inseparable from questions surrounding financing. Even with the most brilliant sustainability ideas integrating energy-efficiency, eco-friendly materials, and smart water conservation technologies, financing remains the primary bottleneck determining whether these innovations remain isolated proposals or become scalable, accessible realities.
Without tailored financial mechanisms bridging both sides of the market, sustainable housing cannot reach critical mass. On the supply side, substantial upfront capital is required to build eco-friendly stock, while on the demand side, long-term affordability requires accessible end-user options.
That connection is right at the heart of Oluwaseun Muraina’s expertise. As an award-winning real estate surveyor, lecturer, and researcher at the University of Lagos, she focuses on how we can build cities that last. Her work blends housing economics with climate resilience, bringing together practical experience in infrastructure finance, public-private partnerships, and community development.
Lagos shows why housing and finance are inseparable.
Lagos provides a clear case study. The city draws steady streams of private investment and rural migrants, driven by its position as West Africa’s ultimate economic engine and land of opportunity. Yet the daily reality for most households is shaped by soaring rents, underfunded infrastructure, and the physical vulnerabilities of informal housing. Economic momentum continues to outpace the municipal frameworks needed to ensure equitable urban development.
At a 2025 housing media engagement in Lagos, Muraina said, “Access to decent and affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult. More Lagosians struggle today than years ago.”
Bringing financial strategy into urban planning is central to Muraina’s approach. Her doctoral research at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development, University of Lagos, under the WITS-TUB-UNILAG Urban Lab program examines how public and private sectors can co-fund major infrastructure, including sustainable housing. Her research looks beyond the number of units promised to the systems behind delivery. In a study of affordable-housing public-private partnerships in Africa, she and her co-authors identified inadequate public finance, rapid urbanization, weak organizational capacity, and poor risk allocation as recurring obstacles.
That is why Muraina has examined alternative routes, including Public-Private Partnership (PPP) structures that bring together public support, private capital, clearer land arrangements, and stronger project management. In her opinion, finance is not an afterthought to housing delivery but part of the infrastructure itself.
In Okerube, the infrastructure challenge begins with everyday life
Informal settlements face particularly unique challenges. That approach becomes tangible in Okerube, an informal settlement in Lagos, where Muraina is co-leading an African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) action research on water, sanitation, and hygiene, working with the ShantyTown Empowerment Foundation(SHEF) and local community groups.
Okerube has grown rapidly while basic services have not kept pace. The ACRC project describes inadequate public infrastructure, dependence on informal water vendors, and sanitation-related health risks. Its response combines participatory mapping, infrastructure development, women-led governance, capacity building, social-enterprise financing and policy engagement.
The idea is simple but consequential: water infrastructure needs a financial and management system capable of keeping it working. “Sustainability for us would mean leaving behind capability and capacities, not dependency,” Muraina explained in an ACRC podcast discussion.
Under the project, existing women’s water and sanitation committees and community development associations are being strengthened rather than bypassed. Revenue from services can be reinvested into operations, while payment models are being explored. The project is also intended as a learning model for other informal settlements.
Nairobi offers a lesson in what happens when communities are counted.
During a learning exchange between Lagos and Nairobi, the ACRC team visited Mukuru, where community organizations have used resident profiling, mapping, and data collection to strengthen engagement with authorities. The visit also examined simplified sewer systems and prepaid water dispensers, where transparent billing and local management form part of the infrastructure solution. For Muraina, the key insight was that communities often possess information that urban systems fail to recognize.
In a reflection authored after the exchange, she wrote that “information without influence is vulnerable. Knowledge without organization is limited.” The observation captures a central theme in her research, showing that sustainable urban development depends not only on technical design, but on who can shape decisions.
The Okerube project is informed by that perspective, where the emphasis is on moving from doing things for communities to doing them with communities.
Making climate resilience investable
Climate change adds another layer to the housing and infrastructure challenge. Flooding, heat, unreliable energy and other pressures can turn poorly planned housing into a long-term financial liability for households, developers, and public authorities. UN-Habitat increasingly treats housing, infrastructure and climate resilience as interconnected parts of urban development rather than separate agendas, for a good reason.
Drawing on her background in investment analysis and portfolio management, she has applied these principles to practice and policy work, including the project on the Lagos Resilience Strategy, which assesses the complex trade-offs between transit, land use, water, energy, and climate resilience. As a founding member of the Inter-Campus Alliance for Sustainable Cities, she co-received a €30,000 grant from the French Embassy in Nigeria to pilot a sustainable solid waste management system aimed at reducing flooding in Lagos Mainland.
Her work on an Inclusive Housing Trust Fund provides another bridge between research and implementation. As a consultant to the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Rethinking Cities, she is developing a private-led-ready framework for Social Rent Housing and Slum upgrading. The framework sets out the fund’s financial, legal and operational mechanics, aimed at expanding access to housing for lower-income urban residents. What could make this framework transformative is the efficiency it is designed to bring to a notoriously rigid process. It aims to minimize administrative bottlenecks and help projects move from proposal to groundbreaking far more quickly by streamlining governance, risk management, and capital allocation. According to her, “this framework allows investors and city leadership to build trust, stretch funding further, and deliver long-overdue housing solutions to the communities that need them most.”
Connecting academic research with citywide challenges
Muraina bridges academic insight and real-world impact. At the University of Lagos, she teaches housing and regeneration, housing economics, real estate finance, investment, and valuation, while guiding research on PPP housing delivery, environmental impacts, and property values.
Her published research tells a similar story of deep curiosity and real-world applications. Whether unraveling public-private partnerships or mapping out climate resilience, Muraina’s publications address the most pressing questions facing developing metropolises today. Her research has sparked dialogues in international forums across Africa and Europe, with support from global institutions including a masters full tuition scholarship from the African Real Estate Society (AfRES) and the Reading Real Estate Foundation (RREF), a doctoral scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and project grants from the French Embassy in Nigeria and the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), to name a few.
What connects these strands is the way of thinking about cities – as a system. Muraina’s work starts with the reality that housing, infrastructure, climate, and finance are not separate conversations for the people living through them. A household that cannot afford a home may also be confronting transport costs, access to water, energy reliability, land insecurity, and environmental risk.
African cities are entering a period in which decisions around these systems will shape economic opportunity and everyday life for years to come. UN-Habitat has placed adequate housing, land, basic services and informal-settlement transformation at the center of its 2026–2029 urban agenda, while development institutions continue to emphasize the financing challenge facing urban infrastructure.
Muraina’s contribution sits within that larger conversation. Still, her work remains grounded in the financing terms behind a housing project, the data held by a neighborhood, the water point that must remain operational and the institutions that determine who gets heard.
For Africa’s cities, the possibility of building more, but to develop better ways to finance, govern and sustain the places people already call home.
