The largest absolute housing deficit is observed in India at over 89 million housing units. About 73 million houses are inadequate in rural India, compared to 16 million in urban areas. The smallest absolute housing deficit is observed in the smallest country in the sample, Costa Rica, at about 50,000 housing units. At per capita level, the largest housing deficit is observed in Botswana with 0.16 housing units estimated to be inadequate, followed by Madagascar (0.14) and Ethiopia (0.13). In comparison, India’s per capita deficit denotes 0.07 housing units (refer to Annex 7 for countries’ urban and rural housing deficits).

Nigeria, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, and India, the five most populous countries in the sample have a cumulative adequate housing deficit of about 132 million housing units. Among those, 34 million housing units are inadequate in urban areas and 98 million units in rural areas. Hence, these five countries account for about 49 percent of the housing deficit in the sample. In Nigeria, about 15.56 million housing units are currently inadequate, affecting about 87 million people. Given its size, Brazil’s adequacy stock deficit is comparatively small (3.43 million), with only 0.02 housing units estimated to be inadequate per person. In contrast to most other countries, the adequate housing stock deficit in urban Brazil is higher (2.6 million) than in rural Brazil (0.8 million). Likewise, in the Russian Federation, the urban housing deficit (2.47 million housing units) is three times the size of the rural housing deficit.

Rwanda’s housing deficit, a country which has 5 percent of Brazil’s population, has a comparable absolute number of inadequate housing units (1.32 million), which amounts to 0.10 inadequate housing units per capita. Sub-Saharan African countries in the sample, which constitute about 95 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population, have a cumulative stock deficit of about 97 million units. Hence, 37 percent of the housing deficit in the sample is accounted for by Sub-Saharan African countries.

An important consideration for the stock housing deficit is understanding the distinction between deficits arising among HHs whose housing units can be upgraded through the provision of infrastructure (e.g., water or sanitation services) or which can be refurbished or repaired (e.g., upgrading building material; better roofing etc.) from those HHs that may need an entirely new housing unit to overcome inadequacies. Although both aspects on inadequacy contribute to the housing deficit, they propose entirely different implications for policy makers and other stakeholders. Our data does not allow us to fully distinguish these two aspects contributing to the overall deficit. For example, consistent data on co-habitation and the number of households sharing the same dwelling are absent in HCESs. Nevertheless, to better understand the scale of the proportion of the deficit requiring new building construction, we assess the prevalence of severe over-crowdedness along the dimension of adequacy of living space in the AHI. In doing so, we assume that this dimension is most closely linked with co-habitation, and given data challenges,