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Ph:DR: Africapolis is the most comprehensive source of information on cities and urbanization in Africa.
Booming Urban Centers as Rapid Urbanization Redefines Africa’s Urban Geography Paris, June 26, 2023 – Africa is experiencing massive urban growth and now has 50% of its territory urbanized, according to the latest findings from reviewing and updating Africapolis 2023 data.
Developed by the Secretariat of the Sahel and West Africa Club of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (SWAC/OECD), Africapolis is the most comprehensive source of information on cities and urbanization in Africa. The new data shows the significant growth of existing urban agglomerations and also records the emergence of hundreds of new urban centers since 2015 in areas generally considered rural; thus contributing to the most comprehensive picture of Africa’s urban geography to date.
Preliminary results of the 2023 update indicate that between 2015 and 2020, the 54 countries of Africa gained more than 1,100 new urban agglomerations and 110 million new urban residents, an increase corresponding to more than 150% of the French population. Africa now has at least 8,500 urban agglomerations with more than 10,000 inhabitants. In addition, existing agglomerations – including towns and cities – have seen their surface area increase by 16% between 2015 and 2020.
On June 21, during the launch of the revised and updated data, Mr. Luc Gnacadja, Founder and President of the GPS-Dev think tank and action group (Governance and policies for sustainable development), former Executive Secretary of UNCTAD and former Minister of Environment, Housing and Urbanism (Benin), stressed the importance of successful urbanization in Africa: To achieve successful urbanization in Africa, we must transform urban informalities into assets . (…) Informalities have been forms of adaptation, bottom-up responses to situations of fragmentation. This generates great agility, a great capacity for innovation and potentially an aptitude for urban revitalization.
Ph:DR: , Mr. Luc Gnacadja, Founder and President of the reflection and action group GPS-Dev (Governance and policies for sustainable development), former Executive Secretary of the UNCCD and former Minister of the Environment, Habitat and Urbanism (Benin)
Luc Gnacadja, GPS-Dev As Africa becomes increasingly urbanized over the coming decades, there is a need to provide government officials, international organizations, NGOs and development banks with a finer understanding of the evolution of urban areas. In the absence of urban planning, growth can lead to extensive informal development, poor integration of new residents and increased costs associated with extending water and electricity services. There is a need to ruralize urban projects and urbanize rural projects.
François Yatta, UCLG Africa Yet urbanization is already improving the lives of millions of people on the continent. On average, people in urban areas enjoy better access to essential services, almost 50% more hours of paid work per week, and receive an education 2 on average twice as long as in urban areas. rural.
Even smaller urban areas are performing better compared to national averages in almost all areas of development, according to the SWAC/OECD Secretariat’s 2022 report, Dynamics of African Urbanization: The Economic Radiance of African Cities. Mrs. Hadizatou Rosine Sori-Coulibaly, Honorary President of the SWAC, underlined the importance of the cross-cutting role of urban development issues: When initiatives exist, particularly concerning local financing issues, it would be interesting to open a dialogue not only with sectoral ministries, but also with ministries that play a transversal role, in order to involve them in the dialogue. Investing in this area can add value globally at the country level.
Hadizatou Rosine Sori-Coulibaly, SWAC Honorary President According to Iris Wilhelm, GIZ Advisor for Cities, leaders can respond to Africapolis data by providing sustained investment to small and medium-sized cities, often overlooked in official statistics but yet representing more than half of total population growth. GIZ uses data from Africapolis through infographics to show trends and developments in urbanization to raise awareness of the rapid urbanization occurring on the continent and to advise the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to promote policy approaches linked to a specific framework.
Iris Wilhelm, GIZ Similarly, Lukas Lüscher, representative of the Swiss Development and Cooperation Agency (SDC), recognized the importance of supporting data collection efforts: Africapolis is an essential tool to support the dynamics of urbanization in Africa; one of its major strengths is that it is interested not only in medium-sized and large cities but also in secondary cities, enabling better anticipation of urbanization dynamics.
Lukas Lüscher, SDC The member states of UEMOA and ECOWAS have experienced considerable urban growth. They are in the midst of a major transition, and this indicates a deep need for investment in the urban sector and requires constant monitoring of trends. Patrick Lamson-Hall, SWAC/OECD Secretariat Africapolis data also plays an essential role in drawing attention to secondary cities (50,000 to 1 million inhabitants) which serve as entry points for rural exodus and play a vital role in establishing rural-urban linkages. Secondary cities improve conditions in rural areas by providing access to better economic opportunities and to services and infrastructure in urban areas. More and more rural households are relying on cities as a means of livelihood through access to many assets and sources of hired labor.
Effective decentralization must be promoted because cities are a collective project, by developing and promoting participatory and responsible governance in order to anticipate these rapid urban transformations. Mame Marie-Bernard Camara Monteiro, UEMOA Finally, urban centers are defined by governments according to legal and administrative criteria that sometimes do not reflect the real extent of an urban agglomeration, thus making the comparison of cities complex. These criteria are difficult to modify, but with Africapolis, policy makers have access to an objective and reliable source of data that provides a representation of the urban geography of their country and allows them to detect and analyze changes over the years. . The definition of urban areas developed by Africapolis has made it possible to detect important cross-border agglomerations and to map and measure metropolitan areas hitherto unknown. Considering space goes hand in hand with considering scale.
At the scale of an agglomeration, we are witnessing the demographic decline of the town centers of large agglomerations. Across the country, however, there is a regional concentration of population. François Moriconi-Ebrard, CNRS The review and update of Africapolis 2023 data will feed into the next report Dynamics of African Urbanization: Planning Urban Expansion, which is scheduled for publication in 2024. ***
Revised and updated data from Africapolis 2023 is available at: www.africapolis.org For all media inquiries, please contact Lia Beyeler, lia.beyeler@oecd.org
