Because it is a small town it is not a focus for government action in the housing sector nor are construction companies likely to build at scale.
Regardless oftheirmotivation, all of these individuals are effectively concretizing a new middle class identityby visibly fixing their private capital into the urban landscape. Thisis not an unusual story within theregion: much modern urban housing provision in Central and West Africa is the product of a multitude of relatively small-scale, privatebuildingprojects and across small towns in West and Central Africa it is individuals or households not large building companies or governments who are building the town plot by plot.

Whilst muchexisting analysis of African urban housing addresses the “informal” self-builtprojects of the urban poor and Given the challenges of housing the urban poorin West Africa it is unsurprising that there has been less research on house-building by prosperous households in the past