Africa’s populations and economic activities are becoming increasingly urban. This transition is referred to as urbanization, and in this report the level of urbanization is defined as the share of a population living in urban areas and the rate of urbanization is the annual increase in this share.

How this transition is handled has important implications for the continent’s migrants, but also for economic growth, the persistence of poverty and the shifting of environmental burdens. Many of Africa’s emerging urban challenges call for regional responses involving some form of international cooperation. This is in part because how countries respond to...

The regional, cross-border nature of much of Africa’s mobility and migration makes it impossible for any national government to formulate and implement appropriate, supportive policies in isolation. Regional responses are not new and regional alliances have been in place sometimes for several decades. The effectiveness of these regional responses and alliances has not always been up to expectations, however, in part because they have failed to come to terms with the nature of the urban transition that underpins a large part of this migration.

Migration has long played an important role in Africa, and it plays an important economic role...

Throughout the world, economic growth and rising living standards have gone hand in hand with urbanisation. The transition from agricultural to industrial economies has involved transforming the economic and population geography of nations. The biggest puzzle about Africa’s rapid urbanisation is why it has not been accompanied by greater economic dynamism. No less than 43% of its urban population lives below the population line (UN-Habitat, 2008). What has stalled the economic forces that would otherwise have created more jobs and higher incomes? And how do Africa’s highly populated cities manage to sustain themselves and avoid disorder without a stronger economic...

Regional activities, cutting across national boundaries, have an essential contribution to make to enabling hundreds of millions of urban dwellers in Africa to secure basic services, secure tenure and housing improvements. Similar problems are found in many countries in the region, including over-specified standards and a reification of formality. The fears about excessive rural—urban migration described in the previous sections have inhibited a thorough reform of urban settlement regulations, many of which originate as far back as the colonial period. In the absence of appropriate shelter policies, the problems of low incomes are exacerbated by illegality, denial of basic...

This section reviews the environmental challenges facing urban areas in Africa with a particular interest in identifying regional dimensions to problems (for instance urban centres from different nations that draw on a common resource base) and solutions (including innovation and learning networks for African cities). It covers all scales and types of environmental problems — and also includes an interest in the issues raised by disasters and by climate change (including current and future impacts and responses through adaptation and mitigation)

Most of the more serious environmental problems in urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa are local ‘brown agenda’ issues where...