Why We're Building Upward
Every year in Nigeria, someone who has never missed a rent payment, who keeps their apartment spotless, who was entirely compliant with the conditions of their previous tenancy agreement gets rejected for a new apartment. Not because of anything they've done per se, but because of their tribe, gender, age occupation and in some cases their religion.
According to ResearchGate, tribal and religious bias accounts for over 21% of tenant rejections in Lagos alone. A Guardian Nigeria survey found that 83% of Nigerian women have experienced housing discrimination as single adults. Landlords routinely screen tenants by ethnicity, marital status, and occupation, not necessarily by their track records. The result is a rental market where your identity seems to matters more than your character.
This is happening against a backdrop of staggering housing scarcity. Nigeria faces a housing deficit of 28 million units, according to the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, a figure that accounts for both the outright shortage and the millions of structurally deficient homes across the country. The formal sector produces roughly 70,000 new housing units per year. The country needs at least 550,000 annually for a decade just to close the gap. For every family that finds an apartment, many more are locked out, and for those from the "wrong" tribe or demographic, the door is largely shut or exceptionally challenging to open.
Building more houses alone won't fix this. You can double Nigeria's housing stock tomorrow and discrimination would still leave millions of qualified tenants without homes.
What We're Building
Upward gives every Nigerian a rent score, a single, objective measure of how good a tenant you are.
Pay your rent on time, your score goes up. Keep your apartment in good shape, it goes up. Stay compliant with the rules of your living space, it goes up. Violate the terms of your tenancy agreement, it goes down. The score is built from verified tenancy data, generated from your payment history, reported by landlords and property managers through the Upward platform.
The logic is simple: while there are landlord with deep seated biases, if the vast majority of landlords can see, in one number, that you've been a reliable tenant for years, your tribe becomes irrelevant, your gender becomes irrelevant, your age and religion become irrelevant. The data speaks for you. We're replacing prejudice with proof.