The World Bank has just released the Report “Africa's Cities: Opening Doors to the World” (festured below and attached). This study, coordinated by Somik Vinay Lall, J. Vernon Henderson, and Anthony J. Venables addreses the question why economic growth in in Sub-Saharan Africa cities has not kept pace with rapid population growth in urban centers.

According to the authors “One factor might be low capital investment, due in part to Africa’s relative poverty: Other regions have reached similar stages of urbanization at higher per capita GDP. This study, however, identifies a deeper reason: African cities are closed to the world. Compared with other developing cities, cities in Africa produce few goods and services for trade on regional and international markets”.

The Introduction to the report focuses on urban challenges faced by African cities in opening door to the world and gives way to Part I: an examination of how urban cenetr are becoming crowded with people but with low capital density, while land, peole and jobs remain disconnected from production. Part II zooms in on what it calls the African development trap looking at aspects such as prices/income and wages/costs of doing business traps, as well as urban constraints such as nontradables, sunk costs, construction and the expectation trap. Finally, Part III looks at ways of leveraging urban development in African cities. On one hand, it aims at identifying property rights and strenghtening urban planning by removing data and legal obstacles whiole improving land valuation, tax collection, the instituional base of urban planning and overall ragulatins and administration. On the other hand, it calls for scaling up invest,ments in physical infrastructire, with special reference to road infrastructure and transport and public services.

While this timely book provides a well-documented account of current capital demands to strenghten and connect infrastructure and production, it remains constrained to the physical and monetary base of industrial urban development. In this sense, it adds up and updates a similar report by the Economist Intelligence Unit “Growing African Cities: Helping you size the market” from 2013, when announcing the EIU’s African Cities data tool. Beyond that undeniably necessary ingredient, it is becoming increasingly clear that a viable development outlook can only be sustained through a more organic mobilization of the intangible capital base. The recent Nairobi Knowledge City initiative exemplifies the direction in which a Capital System can constitute the basis for viable Urban Knowledge-based Development. Mobilizing idle identity, intelligence, relational, human and instrumental capitals might be just as important to achieve an endogenous transformation and empower citizenship.

Source: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository