By Diana Mitlin

In the original terms of reference for what became the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC), DfID (as it was) asked for “operationally relevant research” to catalyse “more effective economic development and poverty reduction policies and programmes in African cities, by FCDO, its partners and other development agencies, including national and local government and civil society”.

We’ve benefitted from close relationships and insights from FCDO staff, both in London and based across the cities we’re working in, but our evolution has been very much up to us.

At a time of major structural change for the whole development sector, we wanted to reflect on where ACRC’s approach and experiences can make a broader contribution to development thinking, policy and practice. While we’ve recently discussed our particular take on issue-based programming and the “parallel tracks” of urban reform and the centrality of trust in reform processes, this blog highlights three key tenets of our approach that could have wider resonance across the sector at the current time.

1. A political perspective is essential to secure reforms in complex urban environments

The ACRC city teams are led by community-focused urban reformers – individuals who have been pushing forward the frontier of policy, programming and practice in African cities for many years. We’ve benefitted enormously from their deeply embedded perspectives, their historical knowledge and their extensive networks within city administrations. Our ongoing work in Harare around climate resilience and informality provides a useful demonstration of the significance of this expertise in securing tangible policy reform.

To this experiential knowledge and expertise, ACRC has added academic expertise in politics, urban systems and economics. These academics are predominantly based in African cities, but with additional capacity from the UK and elsewhere.

In each of the 12 cities we’ve worked in, governance challenges are acute. Common issues include significant revenue gaps for local authorities, how to deal with both customary and modern governance systems, how to respond to informal governance systems (both spatial and economic) and how to manage system integration. We are addressing these and other questions through carefully selected action research initiatives that make up our project portfolios in five cities.

As is evident from even a cursory reading of the news, progress is not universal. Cities are embedded in contested political processes, and new challenges frequently emerge. But the perspectives of those deeply embedded in the process are important to ACRC and appear useful to FCDO colleagues. Urban reform experts are now sharing their combined insights into the processes influencing policy and programming outcomes with FCDO staff (and others), bringing nuanced, practical and effective approaches to securing opportunities for urban reform.

We’ve found that a deep understanding and engagement with the politics of ACRC cities, combined with a flexible approach to programming, provides an effective, impactful approach. Our ambition is to catalyse large-scale, self-funded African initiatives, rather than donor-funded implementation projects. This echoes a recent ODI analysis that working politically can deliver greater value at lower cost.

2. Wicked problems often require a reform coalition

In addition to a strong engagement between active reformers and academics, we are consciously developing a modality of work that focuses on reform coalitions. Such coalitions are aggregations of relevant agencies, who come together to address areas of interest and advance common objectives in terms of urban reform. Typically, the coalitions that we are working with are task-focused and include the professional staff of local authorities, NGOs, academics, organised communities and some private sector agencies. They link groups that can advance their shared objectives more effectively if they work together. They are frequently connected to longstanding city platforms that offer effective means to amplify learning.

We have explicitly sought to draw together residents’ and workers’ organisations with those of higher social status. This can strengthen the voice of disadvantaged groups and improve the relevance of academic and professionally designed interventions.

Ongoing work we’re supporting around the Mukuru Special Planning Area in Nairobi demonstrates the transformative potential of reform coalitions – and also the long term dedication needed to realise change. We’re also seeing how the approach developed in Mukuru can be utilised in a settlement like Mathare.

We know that we are not new here. Previous FCDO-funded research has recognised the value of such approaches – and many other urban interventions have used coalition strategies to good effect. We have an explicit focus on learning how to do this better.

3. Local leadership – and funding – is key

We have long recognised that pro-poor political change has to be driven from below. It is simply not realistic to think that any major urban reforms can be parachuted in by external agencies. Nor would it be seen as legitimate if this was the case.

Building out from our work with coalitions, ACRC has sought to contribute to the work of city-level teams able to advance urban reform. Our approach at the project, city and programme levels are designed to support learning, embed that knowledge and associated capabilities in complementary ways in different agencies and actors, and to reinforce positive outcomes. ACRC involves the iterative, experiential and academic learning of communities, researchers and professionals within government agencies, aligned to share findings and advance together. These groups can reinforce each other, but are also located within the broader public domain, influenced by politics, media, culture and public sentiment, which has a huge influence on the issues that get prioritised – and the ones that don’t. People who are naturally embedded within their own public domain are much better placed to navigate and influence this complex tide of opportunity.

This resonates strong with the localisation approach recognised by the Prime Minister’s address to the UN and the 2023 White Paper.

While the reduced development ambition in the UK is frustrating for ACRC and our amazing group of collaborators (as well as many FCDO staff), our partners’ core interest in collaborating with ACRC is not to acquire development finance. Rather, it is to be part of an alliance to highlight and sharpen key innovations within existing efforts to support urban programming. ACRC partners recognise that to fundamentally improve almost all services within African cities, both service charges and domestic tax revenues are key.

 A role for “outsiders”?

At a time when the global order feels distinctly unstable, national security interests are pushing for militarised borders and addressing the needs of the world’s most disadvantaged citizens is presented as an option that we cannot afford, strong respectful and equitable relationships are key to minimising conflict and maximising development opportunities.

Complex reforms – from providing basic services to the equitable incorporation of informal workers – are inherently political. They require local knowledge, credibility and legitimacy. But our experience also shows that sensitive and strategic support from UK-based organisations can play a useful role in nurturing alternatives, legitimising ideas, advancing new and more effective development options, and ultimately in realising locally held global ambitions for a better world.

While local reformers must be in the driving seat, support from people from the UK (and elsewhere) can add significant value to local processes. As ACRC’s action research projects progress across the African continent, we hope to demonstrate how a different approach to development research and programming can work in practice.

Photo credits: Chris Jordan, Know Your City TV

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Diana Mitlin

For many development programmes, building capabilities and capacities means training, or teaching groups about specific skills or issues. For ACRC, we aim to build the capabilities of communities through the action research process. This is a process that SDI (and other organisations) use widely – but is worth unpacking.

Before we do, it is useful to highlight the difference between capacity and capability:

Capability refers to the ability of the individual or agency to do a specific task. Are they able to do it? Do they understand what is required, and do they have the skills and experience necessary to move forward successfully?

Capacity refers to the scale of the ability to respond to the change.

This blog focuses mainly on capability, which is frequently confused with capacity. 

For example, state agencies and individuals may have the capacity (such as time and resources) to respond, but they may lack the capability (specific skills) to do so. Equally, they may have the capability to act, but simply not have the resource available.

I’m going to outline six stages of building community capabilities, through the lens of an action research project we’ve been supporting in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria. The project has built on an existing effort by the Borno State Geographic Information System (BOGIS), which aims to better integrate informal settlement residents into land titling processes.

Complexities around land tenure and ownership in Maiduguri have led to frequent contestation and evictions, with lowest-income groups the most vulnerable. The project set out to unearth ways to tackle uncertainties around customary land tenure processes and advance the interests of disadvantaged groups. 

1. Working out the change that is needed

The first stage requires identifying groups deeply embedded in relevant processes who are innovators. We provide them with space to analyse the problems and identify possible solutions. Those solutions are then discussed with a wider group of stakeholders. Once the proposed solution is crafted, reviewed and is thought to work, then the process of capability development moves forward.

In Maiduguri, the academics preparing the action research project were keen to build in the customary leaders from the beginning, as they understood the problem. The confusion when formal, state processes landed in the low-income neighbourhood was evident to them. Hence, they wanted to address this challenge by introducing an individual able to mediate between the state agency and community members. They proposed a solution that made sense to the academics.

2. Broader engagement with the proposed solution

For community members, testing the idea and realising the success of ideas that emerge at this first stage help to derisk the process of using innovations. Users need to understand and be confident about the processes being introduced. Equally, this stage offers a further check. If people are not convinced by the idea when it is implemented in practice, there may be a need for a rethink and a redesign.

For processes that are uncomfortable for state agencies, this stage of broader adoption within a neighbourhood helps to generate a critical mass of people who want to see the change happen, which boosts the chances of it being officially adopted. Without upward pressure from the community towards state officials, adoption is unlikely.

For Maiduguri, the solution was a community volunteer for each neighbourhood (who could claim a stipend, to keep costs low). This was someone able to navigate the complexities of BOGIS and address their needs but not be thrown if the questions were hostile or ambivalent. It was also someone who would engage with the people who wanted titles and who was trusted to act in their interests. The character of the individual matters a lot.

3. Gaining support from professionals

In the intense world of urban informality (both spatial and economic), there is every likelihood that the change will involve professionals. These might well be officials (at multiple levels of the state, including street-level bureaucrats and their managers) and/or NGO workers. The change is likely to require them to do things differently. They need to understand the changes needed and why they are required to make them.

This capability development is also part of the testing process. We may discover that the new processes interrupt existing plans and programmes. The first phase of capability development also enables us to understand which language has to change to communicate effectively.

In Maiduguri, this meant co-developing the form with the officials responsible for registering the applications and undertaking the GIS mapping in BOGIS. They needed to buy into this modification to the process, and to sign off on the functionality of the remunerated volunteer. Fortunately, they were positive from the beginning.

BOGIS explained that one of the main obstacles that they faced was the need to link up to individual would-be titled landowners and agree times for the GIS mapping. Sometimes a time was agreed but the individual was not at home. Individual applicants could be a considerable distance from each other, increasing their travel time.

BOGIS officials suggest it would be more efficient to deal with the group of applicants from the same neighbourhood, given that they had a reliable contact person. The ease of doing their job would improve significantly if they did not have the additional costs associated with individual applicants.

4. Changing agency buy-in and rules to prevent blockages

Capability development will also be required from those who control the agencies whose behaviours we are trying to change. They need to understand the process and how it addresses existing blockages within their agency. This may involve new capabilities and new capacities if the change makes the agency much more effective in its work.

As in Maiduguri, once the street-level bureaucrats have bought into the process, there is a need to ensure that those higher up in the organisation appreciate the changes and their functionality. Otherwise there is a risk that senior managers may block the process. For example, they might point out that the remunerated volunteer has no authority from BOGIS. They are also needed, potentially, at the next step when the individual becomes a permanent feature of the BOGIS process. And it may be that some individuals in the agency are reluctant to countenance reform (perhaps because they have found ways to benefit personally from the previous process). Fortunately, the executive secretary of BOGIS is actively involved and engaged in the detail of the process. He also understands the advantages of this new process.

5. Embedding the process within other communities

We cannot assume that the benefits of the new process will be immediately obvious to either the state agency or community members. Hence, there may be a need for outreach programmes that explain the benefits of the new process to others and provide succinct information to enable them to take up what is on offer. The information and examples of what has happened elsewhere may be enough to enable them to take up the new process – but training programmes may also be required. Those training programmes are most likely to be successful if the experience of taking up the new programme is integrated into the training.

This is where we are currently at in Maiduguri. The innovation of the community volunteer, together with the redesign of the application process, is critical to the success of our project and remains at the level of the project, which will continue for a further few months. We don’t know what will happen then. It might be that BOGIS is convinced that this new hybrid informal-formal system is just what they need to ensure that more of those living in informal neighbourhoods secure titles, and that this stipend is a legitimate cost to add to their expenditure. If other neighbourhoods – not included in the action research project but waiting and observing – are keen, then this may sway BOGIS and help to secure their support.

6. Reflections from senior staff to understand the essence of the change

Finally – and significantly – there is a need to build the capability of more senior staff and political leaders, who can usefully reflect on the underlying drivers behind the intervention and the associated innovations, and on how the process has changed. This may also include those inside and outside the state, at neighbourhood to city scale.

This is also capability development, but more focused on the strategy and rationale, rather than the steps within the process itself. It is essential for those senior staff to appreciate the process involved, and the value that it brings. It will enhance the ability of the senior staff to realise the significance of the change and enable them to follow up (through appropriately designed feedback loops). It may also trigger other processes that are consistent with these principles.

In Maiduguri, it is the ability to blend formal and informal processes to support land titles that is making the difference. Such hybrid service delivery may be helpful in other urban systems. Communication about capabilities and capacities can usefully be shared once the process has demonstrated its value and the reports have been completed.

Diverse leaders have already been involved in supporting the equitable land titling project, including senior staff in both the governor’s office and the administration of the Shehu, head of Borno’s traditional institution. The executive secretary of BOGIS is already involved in the project and is well placed to share this knowledge. Grassroots leaders may also be significant in terms of lesson learning. They can share their observations and encourage new approaches in other services that they want to expand to reach new populations.

The importance of capability development to address urban challenges

With one in seven of the global population living in urban informal neighbourhoods, local research and development to produce a range of solutions to systemic urban challenges is urgent. As illustrated here, a few carefully designed activities can make a substantive difference – and there are many such innovations. But they need to be introduced, tested, refined and shared.

Capability development is a process that goes well beyond training programmes in the classroom. Engaged and focused learning in real time appears to make the real difference. In the urban context, dense with people and social institutions, a multi-scalar approach is essential – drawing in key players in diverse contexts to establish self-reinforcing learning cycles.

Read more about:

> The land titling project in Maiduguri
> The Maiduguri city research report

Header photo credit: aroundtheworld.photography / iStock. Aerial shot of the informal settlement of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Diana Mitlin

In previous blog posts, I have discussed some of the key elements behind the effectiveness of ACRC, and the particular importance of trust running through a consortium such as ours. This post explores the added value of the African Cities Research Consortium.

At its simplest, ACRC is a funding mechanism (supported by FCDO) and our respectful, long-standing engagement with our African partners means that we frequently acknowledge our relative lack of expertise and experience within the African context. However, not all aid funding is alike and much has been said about the consequences of one funding modality over another.

How then, does ACRC seek to provide funding to urban reformers with added benefits?

As a leadership, we have to start by acknowledging what we do not know and where our expertise does not lie. The senior management team includes five UK-based members, all from the United Kingdom. This includes myself as CEO, a politics research director, head of project delivery, operations manager and communications manager. The other three members are Africans, the urban development research director is a Ugandan working in the Netherlands in recent years, the uptake director is a Nigerian based in Nigeria and the community knowledge research director is a Zimbabwean now working in South Africa.

Our added value is based on our ability to deliver finance in a way that is sensitive to the trust triad elaborated in the previous blog. It is also based on three non-financial contributions: a collective strategy for learning; a shared commitment to develop the foundations required for further iterations of that collective strategy; and, related to both those things, a collective engagement and commitment to advance urban reform in Africa. These elements are elaborated below.

First, the team is designed to deliver new knowledge through testing both our conceptual framework and theory of change.

This has a number of immediate impacts that change the ways in which colleagues engage with ACRC. It also influences the research and action research collectives that deliver our work.

For example, one immediate consequence of the conceptual framework, and its two pillars of politics and political economy, and urban systems, is to configure new discipline teams which bring together those with scholarship in urban development and those in politics and political science. The urban development scholars (academics and professionals) tend to have disciplinary expertise in planning or architecture, or in social sciences (such as geography, development studies and sociology). In the context of urban development in the global South, this is a new configuration. In some city teams, we have also drawn in economists.

This configuration immediately challenges existing understandings and catalyses new learning. Delivering learning related to the conceptual framework requires transdisciplinary work that builds on the interest among the team in new disciplinary perspectives.

The theory of change (ToC) also requires new transdisciplinary experience. Here there is a focus on the factors that are likely to lead to and maintain urban reform. The ToC proposes simultaneous efforts with respect to securing elite commitment, building state capabilities and capacities, strengthening cross-class reform coalitions and mobilising urban citizens and residents.

The point here is less that we have the answer, and more that we are catalysing a set of discussions and action, that problematise the conditions under which urban reform takes place. Thus far, our ToC has been well received as a good place to start (which reflects the reality that it draws on a lot of African efforts to date) and hence we have a commitment to co-learn to advance our understanding.

In addition to requiring learning about the nature of political aggregation at both elite and grassroots levels – and learning about how to bring urban systems together – the ToC highlights the need to learn across the skillsets of academics, professionals and uptake specialists. Within our action research projects, there is necessarily a direct engagement with decision-makers at the local and city scale. That requires u/s to strategise how engagement can best take place, what are alternative tools and methods, and how can such tools and methods be aggregated. The ACRC city and programme team structure brings that learning to the fore.

Related to the transdisciplinary academic learning, and the research to action uptake learning, is the addition of community knowledge. ACRC believes that building collectives of community researchers at the project and city levels is essential for the following reasons:

• They provide unique insights into grassroots politics and both opportunities and problems in local urban development.
• They have the ability to collect information in low-income neighbourhoods and workplaces in a way that brings out different perspectives from those interviewed which is very different to external researchers.
• They result in grassroots knowledge leaders able to use evidence to support the work of residents’ associations, and trade and worker associations, and hence increase the ability of these agencies to address needs and interests.

All three reasons mean that community knowledge has the potential to add to the work of professional and academic colleagues in the ACRC at the project, city and programme scales.

Second, we’re aiming to build strategic capabilities and capacities to reach new knowledge frontiers.

As previously mentioned, we have been investing in a considerable development of strategies linked to our theory of change. The point is not that our ToC is correct, but that it encourages thinking about the best strategies for urban reform. We are actively engaging around what works.

At the same time, our conceptual framework for the research emphasises the importance of thinking and working politically with the need to integrate systems and sectors. We envisage that the relationships within ACRC will be longstanding, leading to a plethora of new and exciting research and action research.

To help provide the foundations for this, we have deliberately sought to strengthen the capabilities of all those involved in our work. Specific attention has been given to African scholars who have, for a long time, been denied access to global knowledge platforms. We invested in a group of ACRC postdoctoral research fellows during the foundation phase. These fellows supported our domain work and also had time to develop and realise their own research projects. The fellows have continued to develop their work following their completion of the fellowships and are still publishing some of their results.

We have an active academic publication and dissemination strategy related to our work in the foundation phase that we are keen to continue with in the implementation phase. This offers small grants for papers that are taken through to journal publications. We also offer visiting writer placements of up to a month that enable aspiring authors to work with mentors and develop their work. And in January 2025, we held our first capability development workshop for academic authors in Kampala, enabling 18 scholars to work with six mentors to advance drafts through a mix of mini-lectures and writing sessions.

Our goal is both to get our findings published, but more substantively to increase the cadre of published authors, with knowledge and information about the opportunities and challenges in African urban development.

Third, we are seeking to build a collectively managed platform to advance more inclusive and prosperous African cities.

Recognising the power imbalances in bilateral funded programmes, we have sought to develop a structure that decentralises decision making from the centre to the city teams. Building on the experience of the foundation phase, we have a structure for the implementation phase that was shared widely in the consortium and then refined.

We have sought to resource city teams with a locally based city manager to develop and realise the city strategy, along with appropriate support from uptake specialists, senior colleagues and researchers, as well as action research project related investments, to advance the reform frontier in that city. Our review process for decisions and action research projects draws on expertise within and beyond the cities, with the city managers playing an active role.

In addition, we convene six-monthly meetings for the city managers, senior management team and operations team to work together to understand each other’s experiences within the consortium, and to plan the way forward. Recognising that the city managers rarely have time to work together (while the two other groups meet regularly), the in-person workshops are designed as a closed space for city managers to come together and consider if they have a collective input that they wish to present to the other two teams prior to the full workshop. There is then space scheduled in the full workshop to hear and respond to such inputs.

Finally…

The African Cities Research Consortium is a bold attempt to change the face of African cities, catalysing a multiplicity of new approaches to urban reform challenges that demonstrate the ways in which cites can be inclusive, prosperous and environmentally sustainable. It is also a modest contribution designed to recognise, and build on, the immense efforts that have been made by diverse groups of committed urban residents, who have sought to create and maintain urban reform trajectories that produce new urban policies, programmes and practices to achieve similar goals.

The design of ACRC respects the historically significant and ongoing efforts that have been made by those groups of committed urban residents. ACRC also recognises the need for local specificity and contextually sensitive interventions across and beyond urban Africa. The significance of local reformers is, in part, to manage the complexities of local and national politics. But it is also to enable local solutions to emerge that are sensitive to local specificities and embedded in local learning processes, and able to analyse, re-strategise, adjust and continue, including nurturing new cadres of reformers.

However, cities and their residents are not isolated entities. We are connected in complex dynamic interactions that cross economic, social and economic domains. The political challenges can be found at the local level, but the drivers of such challenges are, in part, located well beyond city boundaries.

ACRC’s design recognises this. We have sought to nurture peer networks of African urban scholars (including community researchers and professionals). We are seeking to secure a legacy through investing in knowledge creation institutions, including academic departments and learning practices.

But ultimately, success will only be secured when we recognise that achieving prosperity, inclusion, peace and security behind borders is an illusion. There is one world, and we will either thrive and prosper together, or not at all.

Header photo credit: Wirestock / iStock. Aerial shot of colourful buses in Accra, Ghana.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Diana Mitlin

What does it take for ACRC – a research and action research programme funded and partly designed by FCDO – to support urban transformation?

My previous blog post described the way in which ACRC has nurtured twin tracks to deliver both on the formal process of the FCDO programme and on advancing its collaboration with embedded reform efforts in cities.

In practice, advancing the collaboration, as ACRC moves into its implementation phase, requires simultaneous action on three fronts. It is not possible to wait until one thing is complete. This is because politics is always in play and as outcomes emerge and political interests pick up, we need to ensure that political engagement is framed in a way that is most likely to lead to success and draws in key players. Development is inherently non-linear, and the complexities of urban development mean that trajectories are uneven and uncertain.

Responding to changes requires simultaneously developing activities and building relational capital. This takes place both within the team and beyond to multiple potential stakeholders – most notably key state agencies whose policies, programmes and practices the project seeks to influence. We necessarily have to work with diverse groups within the state and key elites beyond the state because of uncertainties around the trajectory of change.

What is the trust triad?

Trust is central to our ability to operate effectively and is particularly relevant across three key dimensions:

1. Trust in the people and processes to deliver

The teams leading ACRC’s action research projects are tasked to complete activities, deliver outputs and secure outcomes. When this process is being planned, the outcomes are inevitably aspirational. Activities in one quarter build on those in previous quarters, and necessarily interact to secure the change required. There has to be trust from those planning city and programme learning, and those coordinating uptake, in the ability of action research teams to deliver success.

The plans for city and programme learning need to be based on the assumption that some of the promised outcomes will be delivered. Outcomes emerge over time (as the ACRC framework for learning about elite commitment and state capability demonstrate). And plans to bring together that learning cannot wait until the learning arrives. Uptake relationships and plans need to be in place (with some potential for flexibility) and ready to present outcomes and lessons (some of which are likely to be unanticipated). But at the same time, they need to be sufficiently structured to enable the lessons from one project to come together with those of a second and third.

2. Trust to deliver resources (financial, knowledge, external relations)

City-based teams need to know that they will receive the funding for the activities that they have contracted to undertake. They need to know that the funding agency will be empathetic to the challenges that come up, such as those related to local powerbrokers delaying collaboration, personal crises in the lives of key team members, and new difficulties from exogenous shocks. They also need to be confident that ACRC’s senior management and operations teams will be enthusiastic about new opportunities, such as interest from other local authorities, buy-in by key leaders, and overtures from potential collaborators.

None of this means that the ACRC management team has to agree immediately. Rather, it means that queries will be in the spirit of the collaboration, helping the city team to manage challenges and opportunities with support, asking questions that deepen an interrogation of possibilities, and building the confidence and capability of local experts. This can be challenging when local action research and city teams need to offer credible “deals” to keep key powerbrokers on track, while navigating new potentialities as they emerge.

Closely related to the trust to deliver resources is a sense of trust in the values and intention behind the funding commitments. One crucial way that we have been able to build the trust of African colleagues has been the establishment of Community Saver groups in the city of Manchester, utilising the organising approaches developed in the global South by Slum Dwellers International (SDI).

Too often in development, it is assumed that learning and capability development go North to South, and that the exceptions to this are based on personal attributes and commitment, rather than collective processes. Actively reversing this assumed approach through the establishment of these SDI-modelled saving schemes in Manchester is a clear message that “we believe in what you are trying to do, we recognise the quality of your intent, we are keen to learn from your work and apply it in our own context.”

3. Trust to attract the interests of politicians and officials in local and national government

Securing reform through state policy and programming is inevitably a slow process that requires careful preparation. Although things may appear to move quickly at times, genuine openings emerge from sustained, sensitive and intelligent engagement. Hence, if project level activities are to advance to changing policy and programming, preparation needs to begin early in the process, prior to the outcomes being evident. That means preparing for success, building on the existing engagements of the team, displaying a confidence emerging from long-term engagement with the local partners, and navigating the politics of development assistance.

To engage political elites effectively, there has to be a belief that they will engage. So project, city and programme teams have to engage with a constructed trust in the elites. Working across very different organisations, they need to trust in each other to navigate this process, conscious of the potential difficulties such as co-option and changes in administrations.

The trust challenge is considerable and in truth, it cannot be started from scratch on a project such as this. Rather it has to emerge from previous activities which then provide the foundations for new work. ACRC works because it builds on established relationships. Those relationships nurtured trust. It must be emphasised that this trust is not based on an expectation that everything will go perfectly, but rather that long-term relationships establish good intentions and demonstrate the ability of people to deliver.

The path of international development is always uncertain. Projects have to be ambitious to meet acute needs and achieve the goals that are required. The challenges faced by many people in the global South are based on their lack of access to adequate incomes and basic services, the scale of prejudice and discrimination they face because they are the wrong gender, colour, age and ethnicity, and because of structural processes that created exploitation and marginalisation. Now there is the added challenge of adverse climate change.

Good development is difficult – but with trust, it is possible.

Header photo credit: Jjumba Martin / iStock. Kikuubo, a busy trading area in Kampala, Uganda.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Diana Mitlin

The widespread cuts to official development assistance that have recently been announced will have enormous reverberations for some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Whatever emerges from the ashes, the effectiveness of remaining aid programmes will be under more scrutiny than ever. This will require the sector to make some fundamental changes to the way that it operates.  

Despite the fact that significant amounts of aid have failed to deliver intended results, much of the sector recognises that development assistance has supported a multitude of actions to address exclusion, poverty and marginalisation.

But in a context in which financial allocations and programme prioritisation are self-evidently political – and the solutions to many of the crises in the global South are, at least in part, structural – what approach should be taken?

Dealing with issues

A recent report on “issue-based programming” provides a stimulating starting point. This review of some FCDO-funded programmes by Gareth Williams, director of the Policy Practice,  highlights an approach that recognises that aid-financed interventions need to be low cost,  well-designed and locally led.

Issue-based programming (IBP), according to Williams, “is a distinctive approach to international development programming focused on addressing locally defined issues that provide a rallying point for domestic stakeholders to mobilise and drive change” – which he argues is unusual in development practice.

Many of these building blocks are well aligned to our own approach at ACRC. However, I would change the emphasis and give more attention to the contribution of local actors embedded in reform processes, the alignment between those actors and the funding conduit, and hence in the ability to use aid to catalyse political opportunities for reform.

In this blog post, I’ll set out how ACRC’s approach links to the description of issue-based programming – and where our emphasis differs.

Figure 1: The building blocks of issue-based programming

ACRC’s approach

The African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) – funded by FCDO, designed in 2018 and contracted in 2020 – has from the beginning had an emphasis on work to address identified “priority complex problems”. This approach, which was set in the original DFID terms of reference, falls firmly within the definition of issue-based programming.

The foundation phase of ACRC was focused on situational analysis – examining events, challenges and opportunities in 12 African cities using a framework that had an emphasis on both politics (broadly defined) and urban systems. Underpinning this was a recognition that urban programming by agencies such as DFID had often failed because of misunderstandings around the particular nature and interests within urban politics. It also spoke to the siloed nature of many development interventions where one set of activities could exacerbate problems in other systems or sectors.

We are currently a year into the implementation phase which is focused on action research to address issues that emerge from the analysis. Recognising the applied nature of the action research approach, there has been a significant investment in uptake from the beginning. Urban stakeholders (beyond the professionals and academics involved in doing the situational analysis) have been engaged throughout the programme, with specific attention given to low-income residents and workers, and local government (both politicians and officials).

The role of aid

Since the start, we have understood that ACRC is a time-limited (currently 7.5 years), budget-constrained effort, with a commitment to urban reform which leads to less poverty, exclusion and marginalisation – and that this involves both redistribution and growth. Rapid population growth and the increasing impacts of climate change only increase this challenge.

We are funded by development assistance, which is temporary, external and embedded in colonial relations. There are positive and negatives associated with each of these, and to secure the positives and reduce the negatives requires deep, trusted relations between those in Africa and those outside Africa.

The temporary nature of development assistance is frustrating for local NGOs and community groups trying to advance complex agendas, but it pushes all parties to engage with the state. Only the state can fund over the long term and at the scale required, so we have to embed reform within the state.

The external nature of aid-funded programmes raises questions about prioritisation and preference, but it also brings into play the possibilities of ideas and learning. Aid may be recognised as an opportunity by local reformers to present ideas and exemplify possibilities. In this context, it is possible to jump forward plans and programmes and issues that are stuck. Local reformers, in this conceptualisation of well-designed aid programmes, are very much in the driving seat.

Finally, decoloniality and coloniality sit alongside each other in Africa’s urban spaces. The challenge is to build relations anew to increase political reach and de-risk significant innovations, while not pre-determining processes and decisions. That requires regular communication, respect and common purpose.

Hence, from the beginning, we engaged in cities in which we were confident that an urban reform process, broadly framed, was already present and located within agencies and individuals with whom we already had relationships.

I would emphasise that, in my experience, reformers are very frequently present in all urban centres. Working both within and beyond the state, these individuals often have a vision for urban development and are concerned with the public interest. For ACRC, this meant that the presence of a momentum towards reform was not necessarily a limiting factor. All we needed was strong pre-existing relationships. More on this in future blog posts.

ACRC’s parallel tracks and issue-based programming

One of the ways I used to articulate the work of the ACRC in the foundation phase was as parallel tracks. This acknowledged both the stream of activities that were grouped within ACRC, and the accountabilities to FCDO, consortium partners and The University of Manchester, as contract holder. But it also acknowledged the powerful momentum of reform going on within cities, beyond ACRC. This was a momentum that we sought to align with and add value to existing efforts.

Figure 2: The parallel tracks of urban reform

The “programme” side of the parallel tracks is well captured in the IBP processes described by Williams. This is a world in which we engage with the building blocks described in the document (listed in Figure 1 above). We are explicit about our intent, we use our research to identify and analyse issues, we engage with stakeholders to design responses (nurturing inputs from those who are informed and well-placed to act), we have a plan to secure strategic policy and programming changes in the state, and we have a framework for reporting and programme adaptation. We also have an explicit commitment to decolonisation processes with intermittent monitoring as to how we are doing.

The second side of the parallel tracks – the preexisting momentum towards reform – is left out of Williams’ articulation. What are some of the characteristics of work on the other track? The processes of urban reform are tricky. There is a plethora of literature on the complexities of urban development that describes the scale of rent extraction and political interests, the dysfunctionality of the sectoral interventions favoured by governments in both North (funding) and South (executing) and ongoing processes of capitalist exclusion, such as gentrification. But while tricky, urban reform is possible. The people and partners we’re working with in African cities bring:

• Relations with the state. They know who does what in local and national government with respect to urban development. They know who has a genuine commitment and demonstrated capabilities. And they are themselves known to those agencies.
• Relations with low-income groups. There is a moral imperative to include the people and groups whose lives we hope to improve, but they are also vital to achieving longer term changes. The detailed knowledge, insights and priorities of people living within informal settlements are also essential to the management of local politics, which can sustain change.
• Credibility and legitimacy in leading local change. This requires them to have motivation, to have identified and analysed strategic issues and to have engaged with key stakeholders. It also requires them to have some influence on system reform, providing politicians with the confidence to work with them.
• Demonstrated intelligence in terms of designing solutions to agreed problems, with a framing of the solution that is sensitive to local political realities.

For ACRC, as addressing complex problems through action research ramps up through the implementation phase, our current challenge requires a subtly different approach. We are explicitly trying to bring together the tracks representing ACRC programming and preexisting urban reform, to strengthen a pathway towards urban transformation. Now, success requires that the tracks align, albeit for the relatively short life of ACRC.  

Header photo credit: XclusiveVisuals / iStock. The commercial area of Oshodi in Lagos, Nigeria.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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