The number of people living in urban areas in countries of sub-Saharan Africa has more than quintupled in the last 50 years, and is projected to double again in the next 25 years. Thus, a key question for human welfare is whether these new African cities are engines of properity, or poverty traps. A World Bank report, Sub-Saharan Africa’s Urban Awakening: Catalyzing Economic Growth and Job Creation, edited by Mark Roberts and Emily M. Owen, lays out the issues. Although the effects on people living in Africa are the top challenge, it’s worth remembering that the pressures for mass emigration from Africa to Europe and the rest of the world will be heavily shaped by Africa’s cities. The report notes:
Between 1975 and 2025, SSA’s [sub-Saharan Africa’s] urban population increased by a factor of almost 5.4, from 170.2 to 912.6 million, and the number of people in cities grew from 64.0 to 502.9 million. Although population growth rates have slowed, they remain high at around 3.0 percent per annum … If growth continues at this rate, the populations of urban areas and cities will double again within the next 23 to 25 years. … A doubling of the urban population implies a need to double either urban employment or labor productivity over the same period, just for urban GDP per capita to stay constant—a daunting task.
In the rest of the world, urbanization has often been associated with relatively rapid economic growth, but Africa’s record has been more mixed:
Although rising urbanization levels in East Asia and Pacific were consistently accompanied by strongly rising GDP per capita over 1975–2024, the relationship between urbanization and GDP per capita was more mixed for SSA … For SSA, three distinct periods are evident—a first period of urbanization with declining GDP per capita between 1975 and 1995, a second period of urbanization with some growth between 1995 and roughly 2015, and a third period of urbanization without growth since then.
The challenges to building a growth-oriented, job-generating city are manifold–ranging from investment in human and physical infrastructure, to mobilizing private capital (government can’t do it all, and probably can’t do most of it), and a predictable regulatory environment. I won’t try to summarize the report here. But here’s a sense of how the shape of urban employment is different in African countries. The “primary” sector is agriculture, along with fishing, forestry, and natural resource extraction; secondary is manufacturing, and tertiary is services.
The report notes:
Driving the differences is the greater share of SSA’s urban population—15 percent—employed in agriculture, hunting, and fishing … It may seem odd that 15 percent of SSA’s urban population is employed in such activities, but this is consistent with the consumption cities hypothesis, whereby farmers who earn income from cash crops live mainly in smaller towns and cities, where they mostly spend on consumption goods … Meanwhile, the tertiary sector accounts for 68.5 percent of SSA’s urban employment, higher than in both Southeast Asia (64.1 percent) and South Asia (58.9 percent) (refer to figure 1.9). This difference is mainly explained by the greater prevalence of employment in public administration and other (unspecified) services, which likely include a host of small informal vendors, including street vendors and retail businesses …
When you think about large-population cities around the world, here are some of the African cities to keep in mind. The population estimates here are just for the “city,” not the surrounding urban areas.
ads
