UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

UN-Habitat
Nairobi, Kenya. © UN-Habitat

in Partnership
with Africa
Optimizing the urban advantage

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa
Onitsha, Nigeria
© Alessandro Scotti/UN-Habitat

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Introduction

UN-Habitat has worked in many African countries for the past 36 years, and this growing
portfolio is one of the most important for the agency.
Our projections show that around the year 20351, Africa’s collective population will become 50
per cent urban. The majority of political constituencies will then live in cities, demanding means
of subsistence, shelter and services.
UN-Habitat is working with African governments to take early action to position themselves for
predominately urban populations. By the 2043, African cities will collectively be home to 1 billion
people – equivalent to the continent’s total population in 2009.
As the urban population almost doubles in the next two decades the imperative of steering and
guiding the growth process through urban planning becomes a priority undertaking. Equally
urgent is the need to improve liveability and increase productivity of the city through expanding
access to basic services. Indeed, Africa’s increased urban population is a powerful asset for the
continent’s overall transformation. However, it can only attain its full potential when cities are
properly planned and adequately serviced. A major change is needed in the course of Africa’s
urban development – a shift whose main thrust can be propelled by, first, a re-examination of the
planning process and the delivery of basic services.
In our efforts to promote and enhance sustainable urban development in the region, UN-Habitat
in collaboration with governments in the continent convenes, every two years, the African
Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD). The thrust of AMCHUD’s
engagement throughout its seven years existence has been to tackle the African urban challenge
as it manifests itself in the dimensions of growth, poverty, sustainability, governance, and also
recognising the role which cities are playing as engines of development.
This brochure presents an overview of UN-Habitat’s engagement in the continent, reflecting on
what was achieved, how it was made possible, including outlining a strategy which was endorsed
by AMCHUD in March 2012 which highlights opportunities, challenges, and the way forward for
achieving sustainable urban development in Africa.

1 World Urbanisation Prospect 2011 Revision.

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

UN-Habitat presence in Africa

Mali
Libya
Chad
Burkina Faso
Senegal Egypt
Cape Verde

Sudan
Somalia
Liberia
South Sudan
Cameroon
East Africa
Kenya,Uganda,

Gabon Malawi Rwanda, Tanzania

and Burundi

DRC
Madagascar
ECOWAS
Benin Liberia
Burkina Faso
Cape Verde
Mali
Niger
Namibia
Ivory Coast Nigeria Mozambique
Gambia Senegal
Ghana Sierra Leone
Guinea Togo
SADC
Guinea-Bissau Angola Swaziland
Botswana Tanzania
DRC Zambia
Lesotho Zimbabwe
Malawi South Africa
Mauritius Seychelles
Mozambique
Namibia

Source: UN-Habitat 2012

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Our presence and Accomplishments

Project portfolio, target countries, main contributors and achievements

UN-Habitat’s portfolio of ongoing projects in Africa is valued at USD 137.9 million. This
represents 16 per cent of the current total global portfolio of the organization. More than
20 per cent of this portfolio (see Figure 1) is concentrated in the East Africa, primarily for the
Lake Victoria Water and Sanitation Initiative. UN-Habitat also has a significant portfolio in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, in the area of land reform and management, Somalia for post-
crisis recovery and rehabilitation, and Egypt and Libya in planning and capacity building.
Sub-regional projects implemented in partnership with regional economic bodies such as such
as East African Community (EAC), Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA),
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Southern African Development
Community (SADC) are gaining more importance, and UN-Habitat aims to enhance these. Also
gaining momentum are engagements in Mozambique, South Sudan, Rwanda, Liberia, Cameroon,
Senegal, Nigeria, Malawi, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Chad.
UN-Habitat’s strategic engagement in Africa as reflected in Figure 2 below, has been possible
through significant contributions from amongst others the Government of The Netherlands
(through the Water and Sanitation Trust Fund), Libya, Egypt, the European Union, Japan, Italy,
Sweden through Sida, and United Nations sister organizations such as the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa A coal-fired power in Cape Town, South Africa.
© Simsa. Licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alive 3.0Unported Licence

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Figure 1: Geographic Distribution of Ongoing activities in Africa

Burkina Faso 1,525,566 Morocco 361,080

Cameroon 91,852 Mozambique 3,303,997
Cape Verde 500,279 Namibia 877,507
Chad 2,126,966 Nigeria 1,130,472
DRC 6,625,018 Rwanda 2,349,422
East Africa 29,175,241 SADC 1,271,702
ECOWAS 2,103,570 Senegal 2,000,000
Egypt 12,402,200 Somalia 22,418,182
Gabon 34,000 Southern Sudan 2,670,131
Kenya 4,052,061 Sudan 4,496,847
Liberia 4,766,471 Tanzania 1,019,562
Libya 13,885,374 Uganda 149,296
Madagascar 1,251,150 Zimbabwe 508,422
Malawi 760,000
Mali 434,347

Figure 2: Main Contributors to the ongoing Portfolio in Africa

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa Alexandria habour, Egypt.
© Javarman/Shutterstock

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

UN-Habitat’s portfolio in Africa is very diverse in terms of geographic coverage and development
partners. This portfolio is attracting support from various countries and multilateral organizations
interested in promoting sustainable urban development and recovery in the continent.

UN-habitat’s key accomplishments in the region in the past decade include, among others: the
strengthening of the urban safety; promoting good urban governance and improvement of
housing; addressing post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation, slum upgrading, water, waste
management and basic urban services; capacity building, vulnerability and climate change;
supporting decentralization programmes, land tenure and spatial planning.

Box 1: The synopsis of UN-Habitat’s engagement in Africa over the last 10 years are

Areas of Engagement Country

Development and implementation Benin, Eritrea, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Egypt, Libya, Sudan
of urban planning and management and Uganda
policies

Formulation of land management Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Liberia,
policies and legislation for South Sudan, South Africa , and Somalia
implementation

Design and delivery of local Central African Republic, Ghana, Lesotho, Liberia, Mozambique
government capacity building and Rwanda, Sudan, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Somalia, Egypt,
training Cameroon and Libya

Development and execution of Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Somalia,
urban governance and municipal Egypt, Morocco and Libya.
decentralization policies

Design and delivery of housing Burkina Faso, Benin, Burundi, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Chad,
and slum upgrading programmes Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia,
including development of housing Malawi, Mali, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Mozambique,
and shelter policies Uganda, Somalia,Egypt, Morocco and Sudan.

Urban planning including housing Central African Republic, Burundi, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire,
surveys and profiles Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali,
Mauritius, Nigeria, Tanzania, The Gambia, Burkina Faso, Mozambique,
Zambia, Sudanand Uganda, Somalia

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Reconstruction and rehabilitation Burkina Faso, Chad, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya,
of urban infrastructures (housing, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal,
schools, markets, government Tanzania, Sudan, Somaliaand Egypt.
buildings)

Post-conflict reconstruction and Mozambique, Burkina-Faso, Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia
rehabilitation, and disaster risk
reduction

Youth, women and gender Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Kenya, Senegal and
empowerment and mainstreaming Uganda

noted below:

UN-Habitat’s efforts on sustainable urbanisation in the African continent have been widespread,
from North Africa to Sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to the support of governments, and increased
contributions from respective development partners. In recent decades, a lot has been achieved
in bringing greater attention to the challenges associated with urban growth and the increased
urban population in the continent. More needs to be done, as more and complex challenges
emerge which require a focused and renewed engagement from both the governments and
partners.

These challenges, opportunities and solutions for the road ahead are outlined below.

OPPORTUNITIES
Expansion of urban population - A surprising fact of urbanisation in Africa is that in less than
eight years, its urban population will be larger than the total urban population of Europe (569 vs.
553 million people in 2020). It will be also larger than the urban population of Latin America and
the Caribbean (533 million), the first region to become predominantly urban in the developing
world2.This critical mass of people in urban areas represents a great opportunity. Today Africa is
41 per cent urban.

2 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2010), World Urbanization
Prospects: The 2009 Revision. United Nations, New York
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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Accra, Ghana.
© UN-Habitat

Highest economic growth among all regions in the world - Despite the turbulent global
economic environment in recent years, growth in Africa remained robust at around 5 per cent in
2011. Excluding South Africa, which accounts for over a third of the region’s GDP, growth in the
rest of the region was even stronger at 5.9 per cent in 2011, making it one of the fastest growing
developing regions in the world3. According to the projection, “28 out of 52 countries will grow
by more than 5 per cent per year between 2012 and 2016”4.

Economic growth stimulated by increased urbanisation - Urbanisation and economic

growth has not gone hand by hand in Africa, low income countries have a very low level of
urbanisation, concomitantly; high income economies are highly urbanized. This means that as
African countries urbanize they become more prosperous.

3 World Bank (2012) Global Economic Prospects: Uncertainties and vulnerabilities. January 2012
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPROSPECTS/
Resources/334934-1322593305595/8287139-1326374900917/SSARegionalSummary_GEPJan2012_Eng.pdf, last
accessed 2 March 2012.
4 The Economist (2012) Into Africa: Emerging opportunities for Business. June 2012 www.eiu.com
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 Nairobi, Kenya
© Credit
UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Figure 3: Sub-Saharan Africa: GDP per capita level and Proportion Urban Population, 1960 to 2010 (Andrew to
fix diagram in text)
GDP per capita (constant 2000 USD)
Proportion of population that is Urban ( per cent)

700 40

600

30
500

400
20
300

200
10
100

0 0
1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2015
Sources: UN-Habitat, 2012

Increased urbanisation leads to higher prospects of development - Urbanisation in Africa

is providing vital opportunities for positive economic development such as industrialisation and
entry into export markets, as well as social and human advancement. Cities generate economies
of agglomeration important to sustain economic growth and generate jobs and opportunities.
Cities are also attracting national and foreign investments.

Increased coordination of different levels of government - central governments are

increasingly appreciating that they need to work closely with local governments and other actors.
Cities can mobilise more financial resources and integrate other development actors at national
and international levels. National governments, are also initiating decentralization measures
working with active and creative regional and local authorities and also creating better outcomes
with higher social impact.

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 Antananarivo, Madagascar.
© Mogens/Shutterstock
UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

CHALLENGES
Urban basic services - Despite commitments made by African governments over the last
50 years to improve basic service delivery, the Continent suffers from a severe backlog in the
provision of urban basic services to the extent that it will not meet the minimum targets of the
Millennium Development Goals.

Urban planning - The major factors contributing to the above include the manner in which
territorial and urban planning is implemented. The underpinning principles, operational modalities
and the overall institutional settings have contributed to impairing the capacity of governments
in Africa to increase access to basic services, improve quality of delivery, generate prosperity,
and ensure overall sustainability. An urgent challenge, therefore, is how to rectify the inherent
distortions in urban planning, particularly in the context of climate change.

Urban Sprawl - Most African cities are growing in a discontinuous, scattered and low density
form that is not sustainable. Cities are expanding to endless peripheries with very low residential
densities. If the current trend is left to continue, by 2030 majority of African urban centres will
have doubled their spatial areas. A lower density reduces economies of scale and generates
inefficiencies.

Rigid zoning - Where inefficiency in service delivery exists, it is often compounded by the
continuity in the inherited tradition of rigid zoning as a major feature of urban planning. The
inflexible separation of land-use functions not only fragments the African city, but more seriously,
it creates a severe strain on infrastructure and service delivery.

Reactive planning: The demographics of African urbanisation present a dynamic opportunity

for urban development in the Continent. However, today most African cities are implementing
reactive policies and actions to interventions generated by real estate developers and informal
builders. Few cities are planning at the scale for the problems they are facing. In most cases their
interventions are symbolic and micro and not commensurate with the magnitude of the urban
challenges.

The disconnect: In many African cities there is a lack of clear linkage between urban land-use
planning, infrastructure investment and service delivery. Most urban plans have not been linked to
major infrastructural investment programmes including super highways, industrial parks, power
networks, modern waste water treatment and even neighbourhood revitalisation programmes,
such as slum improvements.

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Kampala, Uganda
© Duncan Purvey/Stockphoto

Climate Change: Although some countries and cities are making efforts to integrate climate
change aspects in the development agenda, efforts are still limited and not systematically
integrated in planning tools and related investments. Cutting across all the above challenges
is the impact of climate change. This much discussed phenomenon not only generates an
exponential magnification of the demand for services but also necessitates more sustainable
modes of delivering services.

THE WAY FORWARD

Transformative national urban policy- UN-Habitat is committed to help countries prepare
National Urban Policies that can reassert the role of cities and towns in national development.
This will contribute to maximising the strategic positions of cities and regions, and in some
cases to recreating new comparative advantages for higher levels of prosperity. Governments
embarking on a new National Urban Policy will be able to come up with better, more creative,
productive and inclusive urban development.

Compact cities - African cities need to move away from rigid planning and from urbanisation
that creates low densities and long distances: an unsustainable model that generates cities poorly
connected, socially divided and economically unproductive.

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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Leaders and decision - makers from Africa need to promote cities which optimises demographic
and economic densities. African cities must be more inclusive, more economically viable, greener
and safer places for all.

There is an urgent need to promote a structural change for a more compact city at a human
scale that minimises transport and service delivery cost, optimises the use of land, reduces energy
consumption and supports the protection and organization of urban open spaces.

Guided urban expansions and infill projects are excellent means to create more compact cities.
This has a great potential for the creation of sustainable patterns of development which need
to be accompanied by legal and financial tools to enable municipalities to acquire and manage
sufficient land, pay for compensations, create public land and open spaces, and regulate mix-land
uses, etc.

Synchronizing and synergy: There is an urgent need to develop, consolidate and refine
effective mechanisms for fostering closer collaboration and coordination among public
institutions, first, among national ministries, and secondly across administrative levels. However,
the tendency towards operating in a sectorial manner has remained a major impediment for
the realisation of the full potential of such mechanisms, especially within the current multiparty
democratic dispensation.

The urban agenda transcends individual ministries, and its outcomes are more than the sum of its
parts. UN-Habitat is ready to support governments to foster collaboration and change the target
of urban intervention. Ministerial performance on the ground, and specifically at the city level,
needs to be measured not by the traditional sector outputs, but by the contribution it makes to
achieving defined strategic outcomes.

Capacity Development: An urgent priority is the development of appropriate programmes for

developing local capacity in planning and improving service delivery. The critical requirements at
this level are not only skills and expertise, but also the need to come back to basic aspects such as
the capacity to harness and deploy resources and potentialities in the private sector and among
communities and neighbourhoods.

Closing the Urban Divide: In addition there is an urgent need of transforming planning and
basic service provision from factors which perpetuate urban inequity to instruments for fostering
inclusiveness and prosperity. Urban investments have to take into account the needs and
interests of all social groups including the urban poor, women and youth. UN-Habitat can assist
governments in developing skills and mechanisms for ensuring that spatial as well as project
design are fully inclusive.
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 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Onitsha, Nigeria
18 © Alessandro scotti/UN-Habitat
 UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Initiating Legal Reforms and enhancing institutional capacities: Underlying the success of
the above measures is the urgent need to review existing laws and by-laws with the objective
of streamlining them and bringing into line with the desire of promoting better cities. It is
also desirable to adopt simple norms and basic principles that can guide urban development
and facilitate the transmission of tools and guides to end-users. It is important to work with
governments to reduce and prevent social conflict, political instability, bureaucratic procedures,
and corruption to create an environment conducive to strong and flexible institutions.

Learning to Do Things Together: Achieving higher levels of sustainable urban development is

not an accident. It requires clear policies, simple norms and basic principles, and concerted efforts
from public, private and social actors and requires that different levels of government learn to
work together.

Effective decentralisation demands strong coordination capacities from the central government
and dynamic and well-governed city governments that can respond to the challenges of
subsidiarity as a new organizational principle. Likewise, creative local entrepreneurship is to be
combined with regional and national support and with a clear and solid intervention from private
and social actors.

South-South cooperation: While appreciating that Africa is not unique, the continent’s has to
be understood and its potential optimised. Experiences of other parts of the world need to be
harnessed, particularly those from the South. Indeed, lots of innovations are taking place in Asia
and Latin America. Apart from bilateral arrangements, collaboration with Ministerial bodies of
these regions needs to be developed, and UN-Habitat is ready to play a facilitating role in this
process.

UN-Habitat remains committed to Africa. With the support of the African Development Bank
and other development partners, UN-Habitat is keen to strengthen positive collaboration and
partnerships with all levels of governments, non-governmental organizations, private sector
and regional economic communities such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern
Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC), and the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS), etc. to eradicating urban poverty and in transforming Africa’s urban
development agenda.

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Windhoek, Namibia.
© Attila Jándi/Shutterstock

UN-Habitat in partnership with Africa

Become a UN-HABITAT partner for better cities in Africa

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Contact us at infohabitat@unhabitat.org
For more information please visit our websites www.unhabitat.org

UNITED NATIONS HUMAN SETTLEMENTS PROGRAMME

P.O.Box 30030,Nairobi 00100,Kenya;
Tel: +254-20-7626742; Fax: +254-20-7625015;
infohabitat@unhabitat.org
www.unhabitat.org/publications

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