Twenty-five years ago, one of our co-founders noticed something on the way to his Peace Corps site partner’s home in Côte d’Ivoire. Her house was a well-designed African middle class house that probably cost less than $10,000 to build at the time. Along the way he passed scores of other identical homes in various stages of incompletion – some with just a foundation, others with walls, others with roofs but no windows. Over the course of his two years, not a single one of those homes was completed. He thought over and over that there had to be a better way to build homes in Africa.

There is.

American Homebuilders is building residential and mixed use developments for the emerging middle class of West Africa – and West Africans living abroad – who want a high quality home in their birth countries. We brought production home-building techniques to a region where home construction can often take 20 years or, more cutting that time to few months. We use a combination of local and international technology to maximize building efficiency, minimize environmental impact and reduce costs. AHWA also uses innovative financing through our partner US-Africa Housing Finance (www.usafricahf.com) to allow members of the African diaspora living in OECD countries to achieve home ownership as much as twenty years faster than they might otherwise be able to.

We have demonstrated success in Republic of Guinea with two sold-out developments and a 10-year Public Private Partnership agreement with the government to build 4000 or more homes there. We are raising up to $5M in this round, of which we expect $2M to come through the Crowdfunder platform, and the rest directly from investors to AHWA.