- Paschal Donohoe
Recent visits to South Africa and Ghana brought home to me the scale of Africa’s urban development opportunity. In Johannesburg and Accra, I saw fast-growing cities, teeming with ambition, innovation, and young people looking to build better lives. Their challenges are significant, but so, too, is their potential to create jobs and drive growth.
Too often, descriptions of Sub-Saharan Africa’s cities begin and end with strained infrastructure, youth unemployment, and relentless urban sprawl. But this is only part of the story. With the right investment and policies, the same cities can become engines of opportunity.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s demographics make this an urgent issue. The region must create 15 million new jobs each year to keep pace with population growth. By 2035, more young Africans will enter the labor market each year than in the rest of the world combined. The region also needs better jobs. Recent, rather alarming data show that around one in six urban workers are stuck in informal, low-paid jobs, while more than one in five people between the ages of 20 and 29 are NEET (not in employment, education, or training).
Cities and towns will be central to creating more and better jobs because the region’s population and economic activity will be increasingly concentrated there. Between 2025 and 2050, Sub-Saharan Africa will add 748 million people to its cities, putting its urban population at 1.7 billion by mid-century. The region will be home to one of the largest, youngest, most urban workforces in human history, concentrated in cities that with the right investment can be exceptionally productive.
Other regions, including East Asia and Latin America, hold important lessons. East Asia’s rapid urbanization supported an economic transformation that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in a generation. But it did not happen automatically. It was the product of deliberate, sustained investment in the infrastructure and institutions that let cities do what they do best: bring people and firms together, match workers with opportunities, support local supply chains, and create the conditions for nurturing new industries.
A new report from the World Bank Group, Sub-Saharan Africa’s Urban Awakening, offers a roadmap for governments to channel public investment where it can have the greatest impact. In practice, this means focusing on three priorities: cultivating the kind of productive urban clusters that create jobs and crowd in private capital; guiding urban expansion by reserving land for roads and essential services; and tailoring policies and investments for smaller towns to unlock their strategic potential through stronger connections to markets, tourism destinations, and economic corridors.
In primary and large secondary cities, the top priority is to support job-rich clusters. Since employment in these cities is often dispersed across large areas, the benefits of concentration go unrealized. To correct that, governments should focus on infrastructure and regulatory reforms in the locations that are best suited to help firms grow and workers find opportunities, and where land can be amassed for development. These clusters should be accessible to workers across the city, and governments should invest in public transportation, the integration of formal and informal transportation services, and well-situated affordable housing.
Since growth is especially rapid on the edges of the region’s cities, governments should make plans to accommodate it, using simple measures that can realistically be implemented. Laying out roads and setting aside space for basic services before neighborhoods are built can avoid costly changes later. And by making it easier for neighboring landowners to develop their properties together, urban planners can help create better-organized neighborhoods.
In small towns, which number more than 15,000 across the region, the first task is strategic selection: identify localities with strong economic and geographic foundations. Investment should then be channeled to towns along transportation corridors, near natural re
Financing must be part of the plan from the start. Local governments should strengthen their own revenue sources, including through property-tax reforms that use digital technologies, and link revenue collection to tangible improvements in infrastructure. Stronger revenues can improve a city’s creditworthiness and help it attract private finance, and integrated development plans in strategic urban locations can create opportunities for public-private partnerships in land, housing, transport, and services.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban future is being built right now. The choices made in the next few years will shape the region’s cities for generations. Governments, city leaders, investors, and development partners must move quickly to strengthen infrastructure and institutions and mobilize private capital for housing, transport, services, and businesses. The World Bank Group is ready to help turn these priorities into investment, enabling the region’s cities to deliver on their enormous potential for growth and jobs.
This article was previously published on Project Syndicate.
Paschal Donohoe
Managing Director and Chief Knowledge Officer, World Bank Group
