Infrastructure & Cities

Africa’s cities

February 21, 2014

Global

February 21, 2014

Global
Tom James

Senior Account Manager

Tom works as a Senior Account Manager for M&C Saatchi London. Previously Tom worked as a programming editor for The Economist Events, focussing on food security and the African continent. He has an MA in Strategic Studies, studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and has worked previously as an editor in educational publishing out of Beirut, dabbled in freelance journalism in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq and ran a conference business for IQPC.

Business reports and conferences are chock full of talk of dynamic and energetic African cities and the consumer opportunities they offer. Big companies are building their strategies around it and the idea is seductive. These same cities though are chaotic, generally poorly managed and very often letting their people down.

Cities should act as engines of growth and as effective tools of poverty reduction. They provide the scale that makes goods and service affordable. They offer readily available labour forces that, in time and with regular wages, drive consumer growth.

Beyond this, they act as incubators for ideas and innovation and generally offer a better and more exciting living experience to their rural counterparts.

Chinese growth was partially fuelled by the largest human migration, from rural to urban, that the world has ever seen. Cheap labour made China a centre of manufacturing, lifted millions from poverty and in turn, drove consumer growth, further enriching the population.

Yet in sub-Saharan Africa the same has not happened. African cities are growing quickly, yet poverty reduction is not happening at a similar rate and governments often fail to provide basic services. Women and children drag heavy jerry cans of water home whilst electricity is a dream for some and expensive and unreliable for others. Most work is in the informal sector and the visitor will be struck by the amount of people doing whatever they can to get by.

Opportunities for investors do exist, poverty in certain areas is slowly decreasing and some people are thriving, but the benefits of GDP growth are not being felt by the majority of urban populations.

Of the 400 million people living in towns and cities across Africa, an estimated 62% have made their homes in slums and more than two-thirds are below the poverty line. In such places, African growth has not been inclusive.

Past studies suggest that the slums many new arrivals to cities settled in provided footholds for better things, with greater opportunities than the countryside from where they came. A recent MIT study[i] suggests that slum living actually exerts a negative effect. Residents are more likely to succumb to illness, whilst rents in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, the largest in Africa, suck up a third of expenditure after food. Worse, the paper suggests that slums are poverty traps, holding people down and preventing upward mobility – with the average stay in a slum being 16 years.

Why are African cities failing to be the catalysts of development that they should be? Dr Joan Clos, Executive Director of UN HABITAT, says that the spontaneous nature of urban growth is a problem, along with mismanagement and administrative neglect.

He points to a lack of planning that has led to unregulated construction and subsequent land devaluation and wastage. Lack of investment has left infrastructure weak, retarding development, whilst an absence of a meaningful manufacturing sector and consequent lack of jobs slows consumer growth. This is the opposite of the Chinese story.

So what can be done?  The problem of poorly serviced, chaotic and sprawling cities would be better managed by improved planning. Clos argues that even economically poor cities can have a decent standard of living. Respect for land and development laws, urban design and planning, and a business plan for collection of resources and the delivery and maintenance of public services make a difference.

For African cities to grasp the positive aspects of urban growth, they would be wise to pursue policies that increase the opportunities available to their citizens, rural immigrants or otherwise. Improved access to education and training, government encouragement of manufacturing and better infrastructure are all required and would promote investment. New housing projects might also help.

Without the inputs above, in addition to Clos’s proactive planning, it is possible that the opportunities that cities have offered as agents of manufacturing and consumer growth, and poverty reduction elsewhere, will be partially or wholly missed in Africa. Worse, governments could find themselves with huge centres of poorly educated, unemployed and discontented people. And we know how this turned out in North Africa.

 

[i] Marx, Benjamin, Thomas Stoker, and Tavneet Suri. 2013. "The Economics of Slums in the Developing World." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(4): 187-210.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.

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