Aware of the inability of the government to meet the enormous task of providing good accommodation for Ghana’s working class, Ecobank Ghana Limited has unveiled a housing fair in Accra.

The bank pooled several real estate companies, value chain suppliers, potential home owners and other patrons of residential properties to help bridge the housing deficit, which experts say is set to rise to 2 million units by 2018 from 1.7 million units this year.

The bank maintains that the two-day housing fair would offer several opportunities and various ways of owning homes, “with Ecobank providing what we believe to be the best financing options available today on the market.”

Speaking at the opening of the fair, Executive Director in charge of Legal, Human Resources and Compliance, Mr Morgan Fianko Asiedu, said Ecobank relied on its strong balance sheet to structure and provide for its customers’ medium to long-term financial options at very competitive interest rates.

“As the biggest bank in the country today, Ecobank deems it a privilege to join forces with government and other stakeholders in the quest to provide decent accommodation for all and to assist in reducing the housing deficit,” Mr Asiedu stated.

According to him, some of the challenges facing the country’s housing included the complexity of the land tenure system, the cumbersome land registration process, poor infrastructural development, especially at the city’s outskirts, the high cost of building materials and labour, and poor financing options with prohibitive interest rates.

The challenges, Asiedu reckoned, “have had dire consequences on our people.” “Most of our young men and women in the working class are forced to live at the outskirts of our cities and other commercial towns where they live in sub-standard dwellings with poor amenities and have to commute long distances from their workplaces,” he said.

Notwithstanding the poor quality of homes in most communities, many hardworking men and women have to contend with unreasonable demands from landlords, not to talk of the hundreds of thousands who live in slums in parts of cities in the country.