Harare - ACRC https://www.african-cities.org African Cities Research Consortium Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:41:10 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://www.african-cities.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cropped-Screenshot-2021-03-09-at-15.39.22-32x32.png Harare - ACRC https://www.african-cities.org 32 32 New research: What does progress look like for household microenterprises in African cities? https://www.african-cities.org/new-research-what-does-progress-look-like-for-household-microenterprises-in-african-cities/ Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=9339 A new paper, led by Stephen Gelb, outlines key findings from ACRC’s neighbourhood and district economic development domain research, which looked at HMEs in five African cities: Accra, Ghana; Lagos, Nigeria; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Lilongwe, Malawi; and Harare, Zimbabwe.

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80% of urban workers in sub-Saharan Africa are employed in the informal sector and the vast majority work in household microenterprises (HMEs). They are so called because the owner-operator supplies the labour (sometimes alongside other family members) and usually based within the home.

A new paper, led by Stephen Gelb, outlines key findings from ACRC’s neighbourhood and district economic development domain research, which looked at HMEs in five African cities: Accra, Ghana; Lagos, Nigeria; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Lilongwe, Malawi; and Harare, Zimbabwe.

What does progress look like for HMEs?

The paper argues that “progress” for HMEs is not reflected in better income levels or reducing poverty/inequality at the city scale, but that it involves both the routinisation (stability and predictability) of activities and also security (regularity and permanence) of income – at both the level of individual enterprises and groups of HMEs.

This does not only concern revenues, but also direct and indirect costs for infrastructure and finance, as well as governance arrangements, bargaining power and HME owners’ time – which is especially crucial in small firms.

Understanding HMEs’ productivity challenges

Much existing literature focused on the informal sector and HMEs tends to focus on individual challenges facing these firms, without looking at the interaction between factors and how they are shaped by the political economy of a city. As such, the paper develops a coherent framework for analysing HMEs as firms, bringing together six issues which shape HMEs’ activities, but are often analysed in siloes.

Going on to examine each dimension in detail, the paper emphasises the importance of industrial sub-sector and spatial location in shaping how each dimension impacts an HME, using examples from the research across the five cities. In summary:

1. Formalisation – Critiquing the standard view that informality is chosen by HMEs, the paper argues that state-imposed formalisation, construction and management of market spaces are impractical. HMEs ignore formalisation, taxes are not collected, and HME locations are shaped by customer patterns rather than state orders.

2. Factor supplies – Aside from micro finance institutions, informal savings clubs and mobile money, HMEs often face financial exclusion, forcing them to rely on informal moneylenders. Ecosystems of interdependent institutions, policies and organisations that share a common purpose are therefore needed for both entrepreneurial training and financial literacy, but different ecosystems are needed for different types of HME.

3. Hybrid governance – Formal and informal rules and regulations co-exist for HMEs, with both based on the threat of violence. Informal groups including gangs, political party members or traditional authorities impose charges or “transfer rents” on HMEs – as often do formal state-linked agents, in addition to official fees. Some informal regulation systems, such as market queens in Accra, may also hold legitimacy for HMEs and residents.

4. Agglomeration – Literature on agglomeration in African cities tends to focus on congestion and its impacts – directly on productivity, and indirectly on health, crime and land values. But recent analysis showing that agglomeration benefits exist applies to HMEs too, as seen with sub-sectoral collocation in both services and manufacturing. The reasons include sharing (collective input acquisition), matching (lower transaction costs for customers and manufacturers), and learning from knowledge circulation (usually within sectoral clusters).

5. Value chains with larger firms – HMEs interact extensively with formal firms – both vertically in the same value chain (VC), and horizontally across a single product market. Many HMEs will be pushed towards codified business practices through VC inclusion, while their role in formal sector VCs may affect the latter’s profitability. HMEs have limited power over input and output pricing, and while their negotiation power is linked to their potential switching costs, those organised within a VC can jointly press for greater benefit.

6. HME organisation – While many national, regional or city-based HME associations have large membership numbers, they are not well-consolidated or strongly representative of HMEs. Their policies tend to be “lowest common denominator”, rather than specific to different members’ needs. The paper argues that “indirect formalisation” through registering highly localised networks could be a more useful way to address issues around infrastructure, market spaces, financial inclusion, public tenders and everyday politics.

Strengthening policy around HMEs

In each city, many people continue to earn their livelihoods by running HMEs or working for HMEs run by family members – and there is no sign of this changing significantly in the near future. HMEs provide an important service to consumers in their neighbourhoods, helping them to manage poverty. There is also a strong gender dimension, as women tend to run these enterprises out of necessity.

The paper argues that we need to look at HMEs not as a homogeneous group, but in a more differentiated way. This involves not only distinguishing HMEs from larger firms, but also from each other – in terms of sector, spatial location and gender, as well as their approach to risk and their markets. A “one-size-fits-all” approach cannot work across a whole city; instead, a “bottom up” approach is needed to inform policy and shape successful outcomes for HMEs.

Read the full report
Read the research summary

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Header photo credit: Diana Mitlin. Market stallholders in Accra, Ghana.

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.

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]]> Navigating different approaches to urban reform in Harare https://www.african-cities.org/navigating-different-approaches-to-urban-reform-in-harare/ Wed, 27 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=9303 Urban reform in Harare is approached by the ACRC action research team from the recognition that the city is shaped less by formal plans and policies than by everyday practices of negotiation, self-provisioning and incremental adaptation across multiple systems.

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By Kudzai Chatiza, ACRC Harare in-city urban development research lead, and George Masimba, ACRC Harare city manager

Urban reform in Harare is approached by the ACRC action research team from the recognition that the city is shaped less by formal plans and policies than by everyday practices of negotiation, self-provisioning and incremental adaptation across multiple systems.

In a context characterised by deep informality, constrained municipal autonomy and centralised political control, reform cannot be understood as a linear or technocratic process. Instead, it unfolds through contested, relational and often small-scale shifts in practice that gradually rework how the city is governed and serviced.

Guided by this perspective, the ACRC Harare team conceives reform as an iterative and practice-based process that is anchored in the lived realities of residents, informal workers, community organisations and mid-level state actors. Rather than seeking wholesale policy transformation as an immediate outcome, our strategy prioritises identifying and working through everyday entry points where alternative ways of governing, servicing and imagining the city are already emerging.

These entry points are understood as critical sites through which inclusive urban reform can be negotiated and expanded over time. Considering how deeply entrenched some of the constraining urban development practices have become in Harare, our strategy recognises that reforms in Harare are best approached as an incremental process.

Six pathways to urban reform

In operational terms, reform efforts are focusing on six interrelated and overlapping pathways:

1. The team is working to identify concrete reform agendas grounded in empirical research and everyday urban practices, particularly in relation to urban markets, community-led waste management and informal settlement climate action. These agendas are not treated as fixed blueprints but as evolving propositions that are continuously refined through engagement with affected communities and institutional actors.

2. Making progress in Harare depends on carefully identifying the everyday entry points for advancing urban reforms. This relies on closely examining institutional, regulatory and practice-related openings within the city. The ACRC Harare team draws on existing experiences working in the city, as well as maintaining a close check of the pulse around city priorities and on-going development agendas.

3. The strategy emphasises the deliberate building of reform coalitions by bringing together like-minded actors across state and non-state spheres – including municipal officials, community alliances, civil society organisations and technical practitioners who are already navigating the tensions between formal regulations and lived urban realities.

4. Reform is advanced through structured and informal dialogue processes that create space for negotiation, learning and trust-building across fragmented governance landscapes. Sectoral dialogues and thematic engagements are used to surface shared concerns, align interests and collectively interrogate dominant policy and practice paradigms that reproduce exclusion. These dialogic spaces are particularly important in a political environment where overt contestation may be risky and where reform often proceeds through subtle recalibrations of practice rather than explicit policy confrontation.

5. The strategy places emphasis on developing coherent and contextually grounded reform narratives that can circulate across institutional and community platforms. These narratives draw on research evidence and lived experience to legitimise incremental reforms and to challenge exclusionary urban logics without assuming consensus or political neutrality.

6. The ACRC Harare team seeks to catalyse reform through targeted engagements that link everyday practices to broader policy and institutional processes. This includes supporting pilot interventions, documenting small but meaningful shifts in practice and strategically feeding lessons from these experiences into ongoing policy debates and institutional reforms. Given the contested nature of urban governance in Harare, the strategy recognises that reform gains may be partial, fragile and uneven. However, such gains are treated as significant, both in their immediate effects and in their potential to open further reform possibilities over time.

Forum for constructive engagement – from policy to implementation

A central institutional anchor for this approach is the Slum Upgrading Project Monitoring Committee (PMC), which functions as a critical space for everyday reform work within the municipality. The PMC was established by the City of Harare in 2012 to help coordinate the Slum Upgrading Programme, a citywide slum improvement initiative that was jointly implemented by Dialogue on Shelter, Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and the City of Harare.

In a context marked by frequent turnover of officials and punitive responses to policy innovation, the PMC provides a relatively protected forum in which technical staff and senior officials can engage constructively with community actors and researchers. The committee enables the translation of research insights and coalition-driven agendas into operational discussions around planning, service delivery and upgrading practices, thereby bridging the gap between policy intent and everyday implementation.

Overall, the ACRC Harare reform approach is grounded in the understanding that transformative change in the city will emerge not through singular policy moments, but through the accumulation of negotiated practices, institutional learning and coalition building across multiple sites. By working with, rather than against, the everyday realities of informality and governance constraint, the strategy seeks to contribute to a more inclusive and contextually grounded urban transformation in Harare.

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Photo credits: Chris Jordan

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.

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]]> What is urban development? Reflections from Zimbabwe and Harare https://www.african-cities.org/what-is-urban-development-reflections-from-zimbabwe-and-harare/ Fri, 22 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=9293 “Urban development” is a term that is widely used but rarely unpacked. It often evokes images of new roads, housing estates and expanding city skylines. Yet, when viewed from the perspective of cities like Harare, urban development is far more complex, contested and dynamic than conventional definitions suggest.

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By Kudzai Chatiza, ACRC Harare in-city urban development research lead

“Urban development” is a term that is widely used but rarely unpacked. It often evokes images of new roads, housing estates and expanding city skylines. Yet, when viewed from the perspective of cities like Harare, urban development is far more complex, contested and dynamic than conventional definitions suggest.

Drawing on my role as an in‑city urban development research lead under the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC), this blog reflects on what “urban” and “development” mean in practice, and how urban development is unfolding in Zimbabwe.

Rethinking “urban” and “development”

In Zimbabwe, the term “urban” is commonly used to describe a geographical area with at least 2,500 residents, most of whom do not rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Urban settlements are also typically more compact than rural ones. Importantly, these areas are not always governed by formally designated urban local authorities. They may fall under the jurisdiction of mines, farms, rural district councils (RDCs) or other authorities responsible for their establishment and management.

“Development”, on the other hand, relates to improvements in quality of life. This includes the provision and management of infrastructure, as well as social, economic and environmental services that support both human and non‑human populations.

When these two ideas are brought together, urban development can be understood as the process of improving areas defined as urban. This involves planning and re‑planning, investing in new and existing infrastructure, and managing urban spaces to meet social, economic, environmental and spatial objectives. These objectives are shaped by political decisions and implemented through state and non‑state governance and administrative institutions.

Ultimately, the success (or failure) of urban development is best judged by outcomes: people’s health and wellbeing, access to decent work and environmental sustainability.

Defining urban development in practice

Beyond formal definitions, urban development is often framed in narrower ways – like physical expansion, economic growth or the upgrading of infrastructure. Other perspectives emphasise development as a response to urban challenges, many of which differ in character, intensity and drivers from those found in rural areas.

Urban development is rarely neat or linear. It is shaped by politics, markets, social practices and institutional capacity. These dynamics become particularly visible in cities like Harare, where formal planning systems coexist with widespread informal development. The decisions and actions that support urban development in Harare (and other urban spaces in Zimbabwe) involve national, provincial and local government institutions alongside non-state actors. Often this results in contradictions and conflict.

Insights from a Harare brainstorming session

A brainstorming session with ACRC partners held at the Development Governance Institute (DGI) on 15 December 2025 provided useful insights into how urban development is understood in Harare specifically and Zimbabwe generally.

First, participants highlighted urban development as a multi‑actor and multi‑modal process of delivering constitutional rights (through providing services) to urban residents. It is not only driven by the state. It also involves self‑provision, self‑financing and non‑state mobilisation, all operating within a political economy that often defies conventional urban management models.

The results of this complexity are visible in the city itself. Houses built outside formal planning frameworks and cars purchased but not “counted” are generating enormous demand for water, sanitation, health, education and transport infrastructure and services. These demands expose persistent service gaps.

Second, there was a recognition that many infrastructure and service gaps in Harare stem from largely informal urban growth. Housing and economic activities often precede infrastructure provision, placing after‑the‑fact demands on institutions already weakened by the pace and nature of urbanisation. In this sense, service gaps are not necessarily evidence of “non‑development”, but of development occurring ahead of formal urban systems.

This reality also challenges the assumption that urban development is solely the responsibility of urban local authorities. In practice, alternative authorities and actors often shape urban outcomes, sometimes bypassing formal institutions altogether.

Third, participants recognised that significant urban development is taking place in spatial and governance peripheries. Communal areas, peri‑urban zones and spaces outside designated urban boundaries host distinctive forms of urban development, often under contested and polarising conditions.

These peripheries have generated important lessons on planning, resilience and governance. The lessons are driven from above, below and through uneasy combinations of the two. Following the backlash against Zimbabwe’s once highly ordered urban development model, institutional reforms have lagged behind demand, especially for housing and economic spaces. As a result, urban development in these areas appears fragmented and emergent. This emergent character is only visible upon closer reflection.

Harare as a case of “indigenous” urban development

When applied specifically to Harare, these reflections reveal a city experiencing rapid and uneven urbanisation. Small‑scale construction, largely dominated by housing, coexists with uneven service provision and evolving, make‑do governance practices.

Viewed through an intergovernmental lens, political tensions between an opposition‑run local authority (the City of Harare) and a ruling‑party-led national government have shaped urban development outcomes. These tensions have often undervalued resident agency, even where political affiliation has been used as a means of accessing urban land and economic opportunities.

At the same time, value and economic dynamism have shifted from formal industry and commerce to informal housing and economic sectors. This has made traditional measures of urban development increasingly blurred and difficult to apply.

In recent years, urban development in Zimbabwe, and Harare in particular, has taken on a distinctly “indigenous” character. The state has alternated across the roles of enabler, regulator and lagging service provider. These overlapping and sometimes conflicting roles help explain the coexistence of notable achievements – such as large‑scale land delivery for greenfield housing – alongside serious infrastructure gaps and service failures in both established and newly developed areas.

Self‑provisioning and self‑financing have become defining features of Harare’s growth. Cluster housing, “micro‑malling”, industrial renewal and the rapid spread of fuel stations, food courts and automobile‑spares hubs all point to a city developing through multiple, decentralised nodes, rather than a single, coherent plan. Perhaps the recently concluded Master Plan, if appropriately funded, will be an instrument for managing spatial governance and development contradictions.

Conclusion: Urban development as a living process

Urban development in Harare, and in Zimbabwe more broadly, is neither static nor uniform. It is a dynamic, evolving process shaped by local realities, institutional gaps and the ingenuity of urban residents themselves. While progress has been made, city authorities continue to grapple with both long‑standing and emerging challenges.

Under my role as the ACRC urban development research lead in Harare, the aim is to deepen understanding of these complexities and support more informed policymaking and implementation. A more sustainable and resilient Harare will depend not only on formal plans and institutions, but also on recognising and engaging with the ways urban development happens on the ground.

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Photo credits: Kudzai Chatiza

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.

Acknowledgement: This blog draws on ACRC‑supported work but does not represent the views of the Consortium or its funder, FCDO (United Kingdom). The contributions of ACRC Harare colleagues – especially George Masimba and Tapiwa Nyamukapa – and participants in the 15 December 2025 brainstorming session are gratefully acknowledged.

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.

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]]> Podcast: Urban markets, informality and climate resilience in Harare https://www.african-cities.org/podcast-urban-markets-informality-and-climate-resilience-in-harare/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=9132 Chris Jordan and Rosebella Apollo are joined by Harare-based practitioners George Masimba and Shiela Muganyi to explore what inclusive urban reform looks like in practice.

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“I think one of the most important aspects that has come out of this space is creating that enabling environment where communities can interact with the state without necessarily throwing accusations at each other.”

In this episode, Chris Jordan and co-host Rosebella Apollo are joined by Harare-based practitioners George Masimba and Shiela Muganyi, from Dialogue on Shelter and Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation respectively, to explore what inclusive urban reform looks like in practice. They explore two ACRC action research projects that are currently underway in Harare – the first focused on upgrading urban markets, and the second on building climate change resilience among informal settlement communities.

Reflecting on the urban markets project, George talks about working with market associations across 13 sites in Harare, on elements including data collection, policy engagement, capacity strengthening and infrastructure upgrades. Building on an earlier project based in the Glen View 8 Furniture Complex, he explains how the action research is supporting traders to improve their livelihoods and build resilience in the face of repeated market fires. Shiela then discusses the Informal Settlements Climate Change Action (ISCCA) project, exploring how climate change has become a catalyst for informal settlement upgrading, improving tenure security and driving community-led action in low-income areas. They unpack the role of the Urban Informality Forum as a collaborative platform that brings together communities, city authorities and researchers, and talk about how it could be replicated in other African cities to drive inclusive reform.

> Read more about ACRC’s work in Harare

Chris Jordan is communications and impact manager for the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester, and ACRC’s communications manager.

Rosebella Apollo is ACRC’s research uptake officer, based at the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR) in Nairobi.

George Masimba is head of programmes at Dialogue on Shelter and ACRC’s city manager for Harare.

Shiela Muganyi is a community research leader from the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and part of the ACRC Harare action research project on climate resilience.

Transcript

The full podcast transcript is available below.

Read now

Chris Jordan Hello and welcome to the African Cities Research Consortium podcast. My name is Chris Jordan. I’m the communications manager with ACRC and today I’m joined as a co-host by Rosebella Apollo, our uptake lead in Nairobi. Welcome Rosebella.

Rosebella Apollo Thank you, Chris. I’m happy to be here.

Chris Jordan And we’re also in Manchester with some of the key people in our team from Harare. We have George Masimba who’s the head of programmes at Dialogue on Shelter. Hello, George.

George Masimba Hi, how are you? Glad to be here.

Chris Jordan Great, yeah, good thanks. We’ve also got Shiela Muganyi, also at Dialogue on Shelter, who is heading up the programme around informal settlements and climate resilience. Hi Shiela.

Shiela Muganyi Hi Chris, hi Rosebella, thank you for inviting us.

Chris Jordan Our pleasure. It’s lovely to have you here. So, we wanted to talk to you about some of the work that you’ve got going on in Harare at the moment and some of the surrounding issues. One of the longest standing projects that you’ve had, I think the first one you started, was around urban markets, which are a really key element of the city, providing livelihoods and an economic base for thousands of people. So could you tell me a bit about what the project set out to do and how it’s developed over time?

George Masimba Thank you very much, Chris. Indeed, the work that we’ve done in Harare started with the urban markets work, which I’m going to talk about, and we’ve also had a component around informal settlements, which my colleague Shiela will talk about. So in terms of the urban markets work, like you rightly pointed out, it was as a result of the realisation that markets play in the city in terms livelihoods. But also taking into account the, apart from these opportunities in terms of livelihoods benefits, there are also challenges in these markets, particularly with regards to access to infrastructure and services in these markets and also even the policies that relate to making these spaces more inclusive, more resilient and sustainable as part and parcel of the mainstream city. So, our projects sought to engage with the market associations from across the city of Harare and we targeted about 13 markets from within Harare, and the broad agenda around the project was to undertake what I would consider as three or four elements. So, firstly, it looked at data collection, taking into account that the work that we’re doing is part and parcel of the ACRC action research project. So data collection was a very key element in terms of trying to understand the realities of the markets in Harare. Secondly, there was also a huge component around policy-related processes. And what do we mean here? We were focusing on supporting policy-related engagement with the city in terms of identifying areas that require strengthening, in terms of ensuring that we have the right institutional environment where traders can flourish and the markets as well. And then thirdly, we also had a significant component that focuses on capacity strengthening in terms of the market associations, and also even capacity strengthening in terms of state institutions taking into account the theory of change of ACRC, which speaks to enhanced state capacity as one of the key pillars that unlocks inclusive urban growth. Then, lastly, we had a component around undertaking physical upgrades as a way of demonstrating what can be done in terms of improving these markets when traders, the city, and all the stakeholders come on board in terms trying to solve these issues. So that’s the focus, or that was the focus of the work that we’re doing in Harare. And we started with focusing on one market. Where we made some interventions in terms of the hardware related interventions and this is Glen View 8 Furniture Complex. It’s located towards the southwestern part of the capital of Harare. This, as the name suggests, the market is involved in carpentry items, but beyond that there are also related livelihoods activities that are also happening within the same market apart from the furniture making businesses. So we did collect data, supported by academics and also communities, taking into account the community knowledge component that is a very huge component in terms of the African Cities Research Consortium action research. And then after collecting data, together with the traders, we then sat down to reflect in terms of what was this data telling us. And in terms of the data, it told us about a lot of gaps with respect to infrastructure. And that speaks to issues of access to water and sanitation, for example, and also even drainage in the case of flooding during rain season. But also another element that was so profound or prominent in terms of the findings from Glen View relates to the perennial fire outbreaks that we have become accustomed to in terms of Glen View 8 furniture complex. And if I may say this, since the market was established in 2006, there’s been 15 fire outbreaks in Glen View. So part of the priorities that informed the interventions were hugely informed and influenced by some of these issues that were highlighted or came out of the data processes. And so we began a process of sitting down together with the city, because the the market is owned by the city. But there are also other critical stakeholders including the provincial and central government in terms of supporting SMEs or informal sector. So we worked out how we would then come up with the hardware interventions that sought to respond to some of these priorities identified. And we identified collectively together with the traders WASH interventions as some of the low-hanging fruits as it were that could be rolled out in terms of infrastructure upgrades. And to date I’m happy to note that that work was completed in the first phase. And apart from these hardware interventions, we also learned a significant amount of lessons in terms of what this is teaching us about markets. Despite issues to do with their contested nature, we noted that market associations, traders – they are willing to contribute towards addressing some of the challenges that are faced in these markets and willing in terms of ideas, willing and even in terms resources. But more often you find that there are no opportunities for the different stakeholders to come onto the same table and chart some pathways for bringing these required services into these markets. So that’s something that we have learned through this process, through the ACRC action research in Harare. And just to also note that, apart from Glen View, there were also related interventions that we undertook that touched other markets beyond just the Glen View Furniture Complex. So, for example, the policy engagements that I spoke about earlier involved other markets, in terms of ensuring that whatever institutional frameworks that would be in place would also then enable establishment or supporting markets just beyond the one that had been targeted. And even the learnings, we had opportunities for peer-to-peer learning across these different markets, learning from each other in terms how they were addressing or resolving some of the challenges that they are facing in their markets. And we had an exchange visit with Bulawayo, which is the second capital in Zimbabwe, where Glen View traders were able to also see some of the governance approaches that were being used in terms of administering similar markets. So really, quite a number of lessons that we took away from the first phase and which we hope are going to be very useful in terms of informing the way that lies ahead, in terms of the phase two that is just starting now. And we have plans to, having done Glen View, we have plans to sit down together with the City of Harare and relevant stakeholders in terms of which other markets can we get into. And also supported by the lead for the action research project, which is Development Governance Institute. So that’s what we have done, that’s where we are in terms of the urban markets project, and yeah, we are happy we are here, we are happy we have learnt some considerable amount of lessons through this action research project.

Chris Jordan That’s really fascinating to hear and I know you mentioned the fire outbreaks that regularly happen at Glen View, but also part way through the research that you were doing, there was a major fire at the main urban market, the Mbare market. Did that create opportunities for you? Did it open more space or dialogue around the issues of markets more broadly?

George Masimba Thank you Chris for that question. Indeed, in as much as the fire was very unfortunate, as would always be the case, I think it also presented opportunities for engaging the state. For example, soon after the fire, we were able to facilitate hosting of a policy seminar that drew the city and central government and many other relevant stakeholders together around the Urban Informality Forum, which is a platform that we co-created together with our partners and hosted within the University of Zimbabwe. So, we were able to come up with a policy seminar that specifically focused on disasters in urban markets through, as a result, or following the outbreak at Mbare. And this helped in terms of spotlighting the disaster-related challenges that are faced in urban market and begin to push the key stakeholders, in this case, city and central government authorities, in terms of how do we ensure that markets become resilient against the backdrop of such incidences as the perennial fires that continue to affect markets in Harare? So it indeed provided an opportunity to have some conversations and make out some strategies in terms of how do you support markets so that they become fire resilient, as it were.

Rosebella Apollo Thank you very much, George. Perhaps, just to take us slightly back, I wonder – traditionally, Dialogue on Shelter has focused heavily on engagements with informal settlements and informal settlers. This switch now to working with the urban markets. How do you transition very seamlessly? Like you rightfully put it, you have managed to switch the different sides from the informal settlements to the market and have successfully still put up quite some tangible interventions. How do manage to seamlessly transition, but most importantly, how do you make the inroads for that kind of change?

George Masimba Thank you, Rosebella, for that question. So indeed, the urban markets space and the informal settlements space are two different things, but they are also similar in the sense that you are dealing with informal spaces. So, that informality component or element contributes to our capacity to then transition from this one space to the other, because in many respects, some of the realities or the challenges that they are dealing with are more or less the same. So, you talk of informal settlement, issues of infrastructure gaps are very common, and the same applies to markets, particularly if they are informal and even formal markets. So that common thread in terms of informality running through these different spaces helped us to get around that transition and to be comfortable in terms for dealing with this new space that we were entering into. But I also want to note that we learned a great deal of lessons working with informal markets in terms of how you need to adjust some of the tools and strategies, approaches that you deploy in informal settlements. For example, previously when you are undertaking data collection in informal settlements, the notion of time does not come very much on the forefront, but when you’re dealing with traders and you’re conducting research, time becomes money. And that’s one thing that we learned and it informed the way we’re undertaking data collection processes, taking into account that you are dealing with people whose time is essentially money. So you’ve got to then respond accordingly or adjust accordingly in terms of how you approach the data collection processes, but even the mobilisation processes, all that needs to respond to this different context in terms of markets. So yeah, it was indeed a different space, but we also took a number of lessons in terms of how we could approach that.

Chris Jordan Great and this work, as you said, is ongoing. There’s more to come. Where would you like to get it to? Where do you think the opportunities for reform and improvements around markets are in Harare?

George Masimba So, in terms of opportunities for reform in Harare, they pointed at many things and in terms of what I could talk about right now is how do you leverage traders’ resources in terms of ensuring that markets are upgraded? Because I think, based on the findings, it’s an area that is full of missed opportunities in terms of how traders can contribute towards improvement of their trading spaces, which is something that we are borrowing and learning from the informal settlements space, where communities take a huge part in terms of contributing towards upgrading. And we think there is merit in replicating, of course, adapting that model into markets where you leverage on their resources, both in terms of financial resources, as well as their intellectual resources, in terms how markets can be improved. So that’s an area where we think there is a lot of potential for reform, and we are happy to note that in phase two, a huge focus of our work will look at how do you come up with alternative infrastructure and land tenure models for markets in Harare – the work that is going to be led by Development Governance Institute. And that for us provides the basis and foundation for thinking through processes related to policy reform that respond to the broader agenda that ACRC is pursuing in terms of pushing inclusive urban reform. So, one, land tenure. Two, infrastructure financing in terms of the contribution of traders.

Chris Jordan Thanks, George, and we might come back to some of those broader issues of reform and coalitions and how change is being moved forward in the city, but can I now turn to you, Shiela? So can you tell us a bit about the project that you’re leading around climate change and improving resilience within informal settlements?

Shiela Muganyi Thank you so much, Chris. So the ISCCA project, the Informal Settlements Climate Change Action project, is using climate change as an entry point to slum upgrading in Harare. So at the same time, it’s also strengthening the locally-led adaptation actions that are already happening in the communities and also building the city’s capacity to implement its own framework in terms of slum upgrading. So this is what ISCCA is trying to focus on in Harare’s informal settlements and city-wide.

Chris Jordan And what have you done so far? Has this been research on the ground in terms of looking at different solutions or what’s happened?

Shiela Muganyi Yes, so what we have done so far in the first phase, we have done vulnerability assessments. So the first phase was mainly on research and now we are focusing, this is our second phase, we are now focusing on action, on the action bit. So we have done the vulnerability assessments, we’ve done the mapping, trying to map the hazards, the risks in the communities. And also trying to understand what really happens, what are the causes of these impacts. And then we also developed, we co-developed the communities’ climate change action plans and these are the actions that they are also using to do the locally-led actions in their communities. And also they are using these to also advocate for slum upgrading of their communities. So, for example, the main issue in the communities that’s been coming out, despite the climate change impacts is the issue of tenure. And that’s the biggest challenge that’s preventing the communities themselves to do a locally-led action that can be long-term. Most of the communities are focusing on short-term actions. So the project now is coming in to try and have these conversations with the city, at least for them to understand what’s happening on the ground, the actions that are being done, and also the efforts of the communities to be embedded in the city’s framework. And also, we have been trying to do Urban Informality Forums that bring together the state, the local authorities, different other actors that are relevant to the work that we are doing. So in December on the 5th, we held an Urban Informality Forum, which was mainly focusing on Dzivarasekwa Extension towards other road designs. So this also we made sure that we brought the state to the grassroots because if we looked back, when we used to do these Urban Informality Forums, we used to have meetings in spaces like this, in spaces at the University of Zimbabwe, in spaces at the City of Harare Chambers, and then this time we shifted from that because we want the city to be involved in the plans, in all the action or the work that the communities are doing, and also see how they can support them around the challenges that they are facing. So this is also one of the things that we have done and achieved. And also, in the first phase, we had a project management committee, which is in partnership with the City of Harare, Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation, and Dialogue on Shelter. And some community representatives also managed to be part of these conversations. So the main purpose of this project management committee, it was established around 2010 during the Harare Slum Upgrading Project. So we revived it when the ISCCA project came. So what we achieved from the first project management committee meeting that we held in May last year was the relevant departments of the city of Harare then came in to support Tafara’s informal settlement by issuing them a partial compliance certificate. They also issued them with lease agreements that they are in the process of signing and also approved house plans. So this is a process that’s still in place and almost 75% of the communities managed to sign their lease agreements and to have their own approved house plans. So this was the main achievement or a milestone from this project management committee that we can still embrace. And then, Tafara informal settlement, now we started to do permanent construction on the ground so right now I think it’s plus or minus 30 houses that have been built to roof level. Right now, work is in progress, they’ve been sending photos of what’s happening right now, so this is a milestone for us. And we also had another meeting on the 27th of February, another project management committee some two weeks ago, and we also then tried to see how we can also work into the 11 settlements that are focused by the ISCCA project. So there is a process of regularisation that’s happening in the city of Harare right now. And the relevant department, also one of the main officials, then asked us if we can meet and then also see which of the settlements that we are planning to work with or we are working with so that we can try and see how we can work together with the city of Harare. And right now, in that same meeting, they also reported that they have started regularising 150 informal settlements in Harare, so it’s one of the, during the Harare Slum Upgrading Project, I think we managed to sign a memorandum of understanding between us and the city of Harare, and from this we then produced a slum upgrading strategy, where there are some issues of regularisation policies inside this. So I think they have also started to institutionalise or operationalise the strategy that we produced together. So these are some of the milestones here. I can also talk about the settlement to settlement visits that are ongoing, which are also have been very helpful between the communities, and also another milestone is that the communities themselves are speaking directly to the theory of change reform coalition. The settlements themselves then decided to establish an informal settlements network, which they use as a platform of sharing ideas, sharing concerns, sharing what’s happening in real-time on their settlements. And this informal settlements network has proved to be one of the networks that’s been very helpful in these communities. By that, it was an informal settlement network that started as 11 settlements, only that are focusing on the ISCCA project, but it has now gone beyond the 11 settlements and now we are calling it a city-wide informal settlements network.

Chris Jordan That’s really great and loads that’s happened. I’m really interested in that originally, this was a project that used climate as its focus and its entry point, but it seems like a lot of the positive changes that you’ve seen have been around regularisation and tenure security and some of the bigger, you know, possibly like harder things to achieve around this sort of process. So how’s that worked? Is that just the City of Harare recognising that in order to improve time and resilience, that tenure was a precursor to that?

Shiela Muganyi Yeah, so just because we are having these regular meetings, regular conversations, I think there are a lot of, there are series of conversations or engagements that we’ve been doing, bigger meetings, smaller meetings, you know, with the city of Harare. So I think it is something that the city is embracing. It’s something that the city has also started to look at on another lens. And the other thing that I think is making this relationship stronger between the communities and the City of Harare is that through the Urban Informality Forums and the meetings that we do together, including the affected community representatives, they speak for themselves in these communities. Now they even know that this is the Office of the Surveyor. This is the Office of the Housing Director. They are even known by their names. So I think it’s something that we’ve seen as a catalytic, it’s catalysing, it is trying to speak to what the project’s focus is on.

Rosebella Apollo Perhaps Shiela, you’ve spoken rightly of the involvement of the City of Harare in the processes of the ISCCA project and the bigger reform around regularisation in Harare. I wonder, the Urban Informality Forum has transitioned from being in the university and formal spaces, and now you have brought it to the community. How has that landed? What kind of effects are we seeing in terms of that engagement with the community members, now that the Forum is closer to the community?

Shiela Muganyi Thank you, Rosebella, for that. I think the first achievement for us is actually to bring the state, the ministry, or the minister of state to the ground. And meeting the community and exchanging, I can say, positive conversations. So this is one of our achievements, because it is very hard, especially to bring the ministry down to the people. And then secondly, like I said, the last that we had, it was on the 5th of December 2025. And this was focusing mainly on the designs of the Dzivarasekwa Extension road, which is very damaged by the floods, there are no proper drainage systems in the community. So at that time in December, it was raining in Harare. And so when they came, the roads were flooded, they could not even see where to step when they’re walking. So it was kind of something that had an impact. So the City of Harare and the ministry then came back after this meeting and also tried to have dialogues with the specific community. So there are road designs that are in place right now, and the City of Harare is also trying to help with this organisation that’s helping the City to put in place the designs. The designs are now there, but they are not yet approved. So it’s something that we are seeing, we are just waiting for the approval of the designs, and if they are there, then maybe we can now see how to support the community. Because Dzivarasekwa Extension has already started contributing savings towards the road. So they are just waiting maybe for the designs. And the other thing is that the community itself has had a meeting with their own councillor, the politicians of the community, the ones who also sometimes we say them, these, they call the shots. So they are always being part of the meetings that we hold with the communities. And so the last meeting that we had, the community then agreed to start cleaning wherever they are supposed to start. They started to do any other job that they are supposed to do in preparation for the main work. So this is what’s happening. And so I think just because of the commitment of the state themselves and the local authority in this and also their attendance in our meetings shows that at least we have some pathway.

Chris Jordan And I’m also quite struck by the fact that in both projects, the Urban Informality Forum seems to have played a really crucial role in helping to bring together state, communities and researchers, and has played an important sort of catalytic first stage. Could you just tell us a little bit more about the Urban Informality Forum, George, and where it came from and how it operates?

George Masimba Thank you very much, Chris, for the question. So the history of the Urban Informality Forum can be traced back to 2018, when we created this space together with our colleagues, the Development Governance Institute, ourselves, Dialogue on Shelter, Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation, the Shelter and Homage Trust and the University of Zimbabwe’s planning school. So the logic around creating this space, we looked at it as a learning and policy space, really. The logic being to create some platform that allows for neutral conversations, if I can put it that way, where communities, the state and civil society actors have got the opportunity to talk about what is not working within the city, without necessarily pointing fingers at each other. So we thought the university as a convening space allowed us to engage in these less contested conversations around how do we think of, how do make our cities work, what is needed in terms of policies for our cities to work? So that’s when we established that space and we would identify themes of interest related to informality, various themes of interest related to informality. For example, issues to do with participatory slum upgrading were discussed in some of the earlier seminars. Issues to do with climate change, climate resilience have been discussed. Issues to do with evictions also, stuff that would not normally be conversed with the state and communities on the same table. But we created this platform that allowed people to reflect on their experiences of the city, particularly from an informality lens, if you want. And to date, we have held plus or minus 15 sessions or seminars that have seen officials from the local government, central government, making presentations alongside communities and academics in terms of what needs to be done to make our cities more inclusive, more sustainable and more resilient. And like Shiela indicated, we have also over the last years extended the geography to informal settlements, where all these challenges that we are talking about are being faced. So getting your academics, students also from the universities and officials from the state to get a chance of having this first-hand experience with some of these challenges that communities are encountering in their settlements. But I think one of the most important aspects that has come out of this space is creating that enabling environment where communities can interact with the state without necessarily throwing accusations at each other. A space that allows to present some learnings, ideas from other jurisdictions in terms of what has been tested, what has worked elsewhere, and how it can be adapted in our own local context and come up with solutions that are not only inclusive, but solutions that provide lasting solutions to the challenges that communities are facing. So, that’s the history of the Urban Informality Forum in Harare, and we think we are not there yet, but so far we are very excited about the progress that we have registered through this platform that we call Urban Informality Forum.

Chris Jordan That’s really interesting to hear and I know you’ve inspired lots of other ACRC city teams, our colleagues in Lagos are looking at the moment about how they might be able to set up something similar. Do you think it is an approach that might be useful across other African cities?

George Masimba Yeah, I think it’s an approach that might be very useful in other African cities and it resonates with the approach and logic within ACRC which encourages collaborations between universities, civil society organisations, communities and the state. So I’m imagining, given the the kind of partners or stakeholders that we have under ACRC, where we have different higher institutions of learning collaborating with civil society organisations, it would be very easy to replicate, but of course adapt based on some of the contextual realities in the different cities, under ACRC. I’m imagining that it’s a concept and approach that can be easily replicated elsewhere and provide opportunities for pushing and advancing inclusive urban reforms in African cities.

Rosebella Apollo Perhaps, George, you have rightfully stated that the context across African cities really differs and might be different. Should other cities be interested in setting up, what are some of like the quick reflections around the basics that they need to do to get an Urban Informality Forum?

George Masimba Thank you very much, Rosebella. I think I will refer to an article that I wrote last year that speaks to our experiences around the Open Informality Forum. And I think one of the things that I would do, think is important, it relates to the geography, where you convene these seminars, matters. And we started with the university, we think that was very strategic, because it provides that neutrality in terms of enabling conducive engagements to be undertaken between different parties around inclusive urban reforms. That’s one. Then two, I think it’s also about how you ensure that you deal with power dynamics around ensuring that community voices are given an opportunity to be highlighted and amplified in these spaces, because you risk excluding communities, bringing them on board but excluding them at the same time, if you are not careful about the issue to do or respond to power dynamics that come with the different stakeholders that we are talking about. So that’s the second thing, that sensitivity to power-related issues. Then three, there is also need to take into account the urban politics of the city. I think there’s need to be conscious of the dynamics related to the urban politics of each and every given city that you are working in, so that you also approach the space in ways that will enable meaningful, honest conversations, that will give rise to the inclusive urban reforms that we are talking about. So that element is also key in terms of for those cities that may be interested in experimenting with this idea. But I should also hasten to point out, a lot will also depend on what organically emerges from these processes in terms of what should be the best pathway for establishing a sustainable platform for honest engagement among different parties around urbanism.

Chris Jordan Well, it will be fascinating to see whether any of the other ACRC cities can get something similarly effective going. So we will track that carefully. And I’ll make sure that that paper that you mentioned is linked down in the show notes. And it is also part of a wider special issue on reform coalitions that covers a lot of the ground and a lot the issues that we’ve been talking about more broadly today. But yeah I just want to say, George and Shiela, thank you so much for joining us today, thank you for sharing your insights. Rosebella, thank you as well.

Rosebella Apollo Thank you very much. It’s been an insightful conversation.

Chris Jordan And we will look on with care to see what happens next in Harare. Good luck guys!

George Masimba Thank you, Chris, thank you, Rosebella, for having us here. Bye!

Outro You have been listening to the African Cities Podcast. Remember to subscribe for more urban development insights and interviews from the African Cities Research Consortium.

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Header photo credit: Dialogue on Shelter Trust. An informal settlement resident engaging city officials at an environment and climate policy consultation in Harare.

Note: This article presents the views of the author 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.

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The post Podcast: Urban markets, informality and climate resilience in Harare first appeared on ACRC.

]]> Spotlighting community-led climate resilience efforts in Tafara, Harare https://www.african-cities.org/spotlighting-community-led-climate-resilience-efforts-in-tafara-harare/ Fri, 20 Feb 2026 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=9278 A recent media engagement event, held by the ACRC city team in Harare, has led to a flurry of media coverage in the Zimbabwean press.
The news stories explore findings emerging from the ACRC climate resilience action research project, along with the progress that has been made towards more secure housing through the Harare Slum Upgrading Programme.

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A recent media engagement event, held by the ACRC city team in Harare, has led to a flurry of media coverage in the Zimbabwean press.

The news stories explore findings emerging from the ACRC action research project, “Building climate change resilience of informal settlements through strengthening locally-led climate action and co-producing basic services for Tafara households, Harare” (ISCCA), along with the progress that has been made towards more secure housing through the Harare Slum Upgrading Programme (HSUP).

The articles feature commentary from Evans Banana, ACRC’s uptake lead in Harare and programme coordinator at Dialogue on Shelter, who talks about how the action research is seeking to address critical challenges facing informal settlement residents.

Stories by ZTN Prime and The Herald Online centre around the community-led relocation of families from flood prone settlements in Harare to a planned neighbourhood in Tafara, as part of the HSUP initiative. A collaboration between Dialogue on Shelter, the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and the City of Harare with communities and other partners, the initiative was recently featured as a case study in ACRC’s urban reform database and showcases what community-led urban housing solutions can achieve.

Coverage from NewsDay Zimbabwe focuses on the growing climate risks facing informal settlements in Harare and the key role of communities in building climate resilience. Drawing on insights from ACRC’s ISCCA project, the article highlights the importance of securing land tenure, improving critical infrastructure and strengthening grassroots initiatives to ensure residents of African cities are better equipped to deal with extreme weather events, including flooding, strong winds and extreme heat.

Relatedly, The Southern Environment highlights the work that is being done as part of the ISCCA initiative, spotlighting the central role that women co-researchers are playing in mapping flood-prone areas and documenting sanitation challenges, as well as identifying the climate risks impacting their day-to-day lives.

Watch the ZTN Prime news report below:

Read the online articles:

> Community-driven relocation programme delivers new homes in Harare – The Herald Online

> Harare emerges as climate-resilient testing ground – NewsDay Zimbabwe 

> No Bins, No Waste, No Waiting: Inside Tafara’s Community-Led Climate Solutions – The Southern Environment

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Photo credits: Chris Jordan

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.

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]]> What drives land value change in African cities? Unlocking value and the prospects for progressive reform https://www.african-cities.org/what-drives-land-value-change-in-african-cities-unlocking-value-and-the-prospects-for-progressive-reform/ Thu, 28 Aug 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=8170 The urgency of developing more effective mechanisms to capture rising land values for urban infrastructure and services is now widely acknowledged. It is also accepted that this is highly challenging.

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By Tom Goodfellow, University of Sheffield, co-lead of ACRC’s land and connectivity domain research

The urgency of developing more effective mechanisms to capture rising land values for urban infrastructure and services is now widely acknowledged. It is also accepted that this is highly challenging; as well as facing numerous bureaucratic obstacles, urban land management is entwined with processes of political and economic bargaining, and there are often intense efforts by non-state actors (including brokers) to capture large portions of land value for themselves.

A recent ACRC workshop in Accra on property taxation, linked to earlier work in the land and connectivity domain, highlighted the ongoing importance of effective valuation. Valuation itself faces numerous technical and political challenges: accurately recording land and property values can be expensive, technically complex and subject to all kinds of interference. In many countries, taxing urban land is so fraught that only the buildings on it are valued, leaving a substantial part of property wealth untouched.

In order to unlock land values as a tool of redistribution, it is important to understand what actually shapes them, and which factors stimulate land value change. Why do some areas of a city – or some specific plots of land – become so much more valuable than others? This matters, because the legitimacy of land value capture is rooted in certain assumptions about how value is created. These assumptions have proved to be questionable in many African cities.

Our collective work in the land and connectivity domain report highlighted some of the actual drivers of land value change in the cities we examined: Accra, Bukavu, Harare, Kampala, Maiduguri and Mogadishu. Here, I build on this to consider how these findings challenge some of the dominant notions on which ideas of value capture are based.

“Paradigmatic ideas” about land value change

Answers to the question of what shapes land values might seem obvious, and there are plenty of proposed mechanisms posited in the disciplines of economics and planning, based largely on the experiences of advanced industrial economies. In the language of ACRC’s conceptual framework, a set of “paradigmatic ideas” dominates assumptions about land value change and feeds into policy discourses, both internationally and at more local levels.

These paradigmatic ideas depend heavily on a distinction between private property as the main site of value, and public infrastructure and public regulation as primary drivers of that value.

The received wisdom is that (private) land value increases are largely driven by three factors:

1. Increased economic activity or prosperity in an area, which inflates demand for the land

2. Public infrastructure investments that make the land more desirable

3. Changes to planning permission/regulations that again increase its desirability and therefore value

The logic, then, is that for factors 2 and 3, the uplift in value is caused by the state – by public infrastructure and regulation – and therefore it can legitimately be recaptured by the state for redistribution.

Unsettling the received wisdom

But what if much of the infrastructure provided to service urban land in an urban area is not public, but rather provided by private (and often informal) providers? What if regulations about what can and can’t be built in an area are determined less by the state than by other kinds of authority? And, moreover, what if the land in question is not straightforwardly “private”, such that any official owner being taxed also has to contend with paying a range of other levies related to more collective territorial claims on the land?

Our research revealed such dynamics in a number of cities. It suggests that the paradigmatic ideas do not represent the whole story about drivers of value change, and that context-specific institutions and practices are central. Attention to contextual “price signals” has often been present in land rent theory and the “hedonic modelling” used by real estate researchers and analysts – yet this often gets lost in contemporary value capture discourses, and such models also miss some of the most important factors in the cities we studied.

Aerial view over Maiduguri, Nigera. Photo credit: IRC

The real drivers of land value change: Findings from the land and connectivity domain

Our studies unsettle this assumption that urban property is primarily private and infrastructure is primarily public. This is particularly true if we consider property development in peripheral or suburban areas, which is taking place across many African cities.

Let’s first consider the idea of private property. In a city such as Accra or Lagos, individual property rights and heightened land commodification are very real, but co-exist and overlap with “customary” forms of tenure. Thus, while sales to individuals are common, various other actors continue to make claims to benefit from the land’s use, often based on longstanding collective ancestral rights. A share of any increase in the value of this land is therefore seen as rightfully belonging not just to the official owner but also a range of (often quite diffuse) actors. In Accra, for example, various categories of “land guards”, with varying degrees of popular and historical legitimacy, claim fees and levies for different stages in the development of property on land.

When land retains these social and collective attributes, focusing just on the property relation – for example, through taxing the owner – without attention to these other dynamics, it can result in feelings of “over taxation” and illegitimacy.

When it comes to the question of infrastructure provision and regulation, the picture from our cities also diverges substantially from the paradigmatic ideas. While major public infrastructure such as roads does often substantially bolster land value, in other cases the opposite occurs. In examples from Maiduguri and Kampala, certain road investments appeared to dampen or even reverse local rises in land value, due to having adverse impacts on personal security (such as if the road becomes associated with a rise in violent criminal activity, for instance), local population mobility, or the functioning of other infrastructure.

Moreover, the kinds of infrastructure that did significantly increase land values was often privately rather than publicly provided. In Mogadishu, for example, certain new suburbs were served with privately provided roads as well as private services such as schools, hospitals and green areas, all of which boosted land values. In peripheral areas of other cities, including Harare and Accra, the role of private actors in providing infrastructure – and sometimes also planning and regulatory services of various kinds – tells a broadly similar story.

Implications for urban reform

These findings must give us pause when thinking about appropriate routes for capturing land values. The idea of public interventions to boost (and recoup) privately held value makes less sense when, in practice, private interventions have been generating much of the value. Meanwhile, taxing land value is not straightforward in cases where it has not simply accrued to an identifiable private actor.

This is not to say that efforts towards property taxation and other forms of value capture should not be pursued. Indeed, they remain urgent. But as well as building government capacity to register values and collect taxes, there need to be ongoing efforts to build understanding on the moral and political principles underpinning property taxation, and public dialogue acknowledging the challenges people face paying tax alongside levies to non-state actors. These efforts need to be accompanied by incremental improvements to public infrastructure provision.

As so much of ACRC’s work had demonstrated, successful urban reform is rooted in trust, collective mobilisation and the building of reform coalitions. This is as true of property taxation as any other urban domain, and the better we understand the nature and drivers of the value to be taxed, the more likely that a collective agenda to redistribute this wealth will materialise.

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Header photo credit: Barnabas Lartey-Odoi Tetteh / Unsplash. Accra cityscape.

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.

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The post What drives land value change in African cities? Unlocking value and the prospects for progressive reform first appeared on ACRC.

]]> Amplifying local voices to influence climate policy in Harare https://www.african-cities.org/amplifying-local-voices-to-influence-climate-policy-in-harare/ Wed, 23 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=7621 The impacts of climate change are already exacerbating the challenges posed by urbanisation in Africa. For informal settlements, the capacity for resilience remains critically low, leaving them highly vulnerable to both natural and human-made hazards. In response, communities of low-income urban residents are coming up with innovative climate-resilient solutions through locally driven climate adaptation initiatives.

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By Evans Banana, ACRC Harare uptake officer

The impacts of climate change are already exacerbating the challenges posed by urbanisation in Africa. While the gap between formal and informal settlements – planned and unplanned, legal and illegal – is slowly narrowing, informal settlements continue to be most affected, primarily due to insecure tenure and inadequate access to basic infrastructure resulting in serious health challenges.

For informal settlements, the capacity for resilience remains critically low, leaving them highly vulnerable to both natural and human-made hazards. In response, communities of low-income urban residents are coming up with innovative climate-resilient solutions through locally driven climate adaptation initiatives. Yet while these local solutions show great potential, they enjoy limited institutionalisation and policy support from authorities, constraining their capacity for scaling up and having a broader impact.

ACRC at the Climate and Health Africa Conference (CHAC)

Held in Harare in October 2024, the inaugural Climate and Health Africa Conference (CHAC) provided a platform to unpack the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and children living in informal settlements in Zimbabwe.

As part of this landmark event, Dialogue on Shelter for the Homeless Trust (DoST) and its Slum Dwellers International (SDI) affiliate, the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation, organised a side event on 1 November. Titled Understanding Climate Change-Induced Health Risks for Women and Children in Informal Settlements in Zimbabwe, the event attracted participants from informal settlements, community-based organisations, state representatives, academia and development agencies.

The side event highlighted pressing climate and health issues affecting women and children in marginalised communities, while providing a unique platform for residents to share locally led adaptation strategies and propose solutions to the daily challenges they face. As a result of this gathering, significant policy shifts were initiated, particularly around methodology and approach. Coinciding with the city’s Environment and Climate Policy making process, the session played a crucial role in encouraging the city to consult informal settlements separately to understand their complexities and harness additional ideas.

A gathering of voices

ACRC’s Harare research team took the opportunity presented by CHAC to share key findings from the programme’s foundation phase – particularly the informal settlements domain. To foster inclusive dialogue, speakers were carefully selected from informal settlers, international organisations, and the City of Harare.

Sekai Catherine Chiremba, one of the key speakers, opened the discussion by sharing her insights into how informal settlements – which are often excluded from development and disaster-response efforts – are disproportionately affected by climate shocks. She explained how the absence of basic infrastructure in these areas increases vulnerability to disasters like droughts, floods and poor energy access, disproportionately impacting women and children.

Youth from Epworth settlement participating during the side event.

The second speaker, Lisben Chipfunde from the City of Harare’s City Environment Management Unit (CEMU), provided an overview of how the city is working to tackle multiple challenges sustainably. He discussed the financial and human resource constraints the city faces to maintain and expand the ageing infrastructure. He spoke on the urgent need for deeper collaboration with stakeholders as a way of ensuring inclusive resilience building across the city systems.

Additionally, he presented the Environment and Climate Policy that the city was working on, particularly highlighting its bottom-up approach, which involves consultations at the administrative ward level. However, informal settlers voiced concerns that this approach might overlook their specific needs. In response, the city committed to adjusting the consultation process to ensure that informal settlements would be consulted separately to address their unique challenges and emerging adaptation strategies.

Session key speakers: Sekai Catherine Chiremba (left), Jeremia Mushosho (centre) and Lisben Chipfunde (right).

The third speaker, Jeremia Mushosho from the World Health Organization (WHO), shared global perspectives on the intersection of climate and health, as well as talking about climate finance and how this is being employed in different contexts to address climate impacts. His discussion on climate finance generated significant interest, as participants sought clarity on how financial resources could be more effectively mobilised to address climate and health issues. The event emphasised the importance of long-term strategies to enhance climate action and urban health.

What made the session more transformative was its focus on co-production. ACRC’s Harare city manager, George Masimba, highlighted the two action research projects being implemented in Harare. Specifically, he mentioned the co-production of inclusive infrastructure at the Glen View 8 furniture complex, along with the documentation of climate change impacts in informal settlements and the targeted co-production of infrastructure works in Tafara. He reiterated the need to consolidate lessons from interventions to systematically design appropriate ways for cities to work alongside local communities, not only in responding to crises but in shaping their future development. 

Evans Banana presenting during the side event.

Inclusivity: Shaping policy from the bottom up

In the months since the conference, the participation of the ACRC Harare research team has had ripple effects far beyond the event itself. The City of Harare has started incorporating community feedback into its policy design, recognising that policies can only be effective if they are informed by the local communities who will be most affected by them. The City of Harare’s Environment and Climate Policy methodology is using a bottom-up approach, embracing a more inclusive approach to governance.

To meet this ambition, DoST and the Federation have facilitated additional policy dialogue sessions with several informal settlements in the city. Residents from 12 informal settlements – are Dzivarasekwa Extension, Stoneridge, Hopley, Churu, Tafara, Mabvuku-Chizhanje, Boko Haram, Crowborough Paddocks, Caledonia, Budiriro, Lyndhurst and Hatcliffe – met with city officials to share their experiences and insights, directly informing the policymaking process. These discussions have elevated the voices of informal settlers, transforming their once marginalised status into a central part of the policy review and formulation process.

Specifically, residents identified insecure tenure as the biggest hurdle limiting climate resilience of informal settlements. Communities believe that appropriate regularisation modalities will unlock community potential and empower them to be equal co-production partners. To operationalise this ambition, communities identified the co-generation of climate vulnerability assessments across settlements and co-development of climate action plans as key. Additionally, communities presented the institutionalisation of community participation in infrastructural development, environmental stewardship and the inclusion of slum upgrading as a sustainable way of building resilience in settlements.

The shift is profound. In the past, informal settlements were criminalised and ignored by local authorities. Now, these communities are recognised as essential stakeholders, with the potential to contribute to creating climate-resilient cities and policies. The Federation has also mobilised its members in other city wards, ensuring broader participation in future consultation meetings.

Some of the informal settlers engaging city during the Environment and Climate Policy consultations.

Consolidating the gains from collaboration and co-creation

As the ACRC Harare research team continues to implement action research projects, the lessons learned from these engagements will play a pivotal role in shaping future urban policies. The city has recognised that communities are not a homogeneous group, and the need to further accommodate residents who were once marginalised, such as informal settlers. The knock-on effects of these engagements have enhanced the institutional profile of the alliance as a key player in urban development.

Going forward, with a strong foundation for meaningful collaboration, the ACRC Harare team plans to continue its policy-related engagements and create pathways for innovative pilots to be integrated into actual policies. Through its role in the ACRC Harare action research, DoST has already been invited to join the technical team working on finalising the Environment and Climate Policy, and discussions are underway to explore more inclusive ways of reviewing the city Housing Policy.

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Photo credits: Tarisai Manyowa, Teurai Nyamangara and Evans Banana

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.

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]]> Magicians, powerbrokers and workhorses: The keys to structural transformation in African cities https://www.african-cities.org/magicians-powerbrokers-and-workhorses-the-keys-to-structural-transformation-in-african-cities/ Tue, 21 Jan 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=7245 Structural transformation involves the movement of workers from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors – often from agriculture to manufacturing and services – and is a necessary condition for sustained economic growth.

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By Kunal Sen, director of UNU-WIDER

Structural transformation involves the movement of workers from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors – often from agriculture to manufacturing and services – and is a necessary condition for sustained economic growth.

Around the world, we tend to see urbanisation and structural transformation happening together – as countries urbanise, productive jobs are created in manufacturing and services. But while sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing considerable urbanisation (and driving global urban expansion), the structural transformation that we would expect to see – and have seen, for example, in East Asia and Latin America – is largely absent in the region. One major challenge created by this absence is a lack of well paid, formal jobs to meet the needs of a growing population.

How can we bridge this gap between urbanisation and structural transformation in African cities? This is the question we are seeking to answer with ACRC’s structural transformation domain research, led by UNU-WIDER.

A manufacturing facility in Kenya. Photo credit: Bidco Africa Ltd / Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED)

What drives structural transformation?

Over the last two years, we have worked closely with researchers in six African cities – Accra, Ghana; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Harare, Zimbabwe; Lagos, Nigeria; and Nairobi, Kenya. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we have built on concepts developed in the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) programme, with the aim of better understanding the political economy drivers of structural transformation – and the implications for individual cities.

To know how political economy drives structural transformation, we need to understand the way that cities, states and business interact. Historically, when we have collaborative or synergistic state–business relations – whether at the city, subnational or national level – we tend to see economic growth and structural transformation. That has certainly been the case in East Asia and Latin America. But what about in African cities?

To answer this, we categorise different types of enterprise, and look at which are most conducive to structural transformation.

> Magicians

Manufacturing and tradeable services firms – including IT and tourism – are key to structural transformation. They are export-oriented firms that drive investment and growth, but also rely on the state for policies that help them prosper and grow to face world competition. We call this set of firms “magicians” because they are competing in the global market and export within those constraints.

> Workhorses

Along with magicians, we also tend to see “workhorses”. These are informal enterprises, both in services and manufacturing, that operate mostly for the domestic market. Street vendors are a classic example of workhorses in African cities. They are not very productive enterprises, but they are important because they also face and create competition in the domestic market.

> Powerbrokers

The final group key to understanding the political economy drivers of structural transformation are “powerbrokers”. Powerbrokers are enterprises – such as utility companies, telecommunications providers and real estate firms – which also produce for the domestic market but tend to have a large share of the market. As they do not face the same competitive pressures as workhorses or magicians, they hold a lot of power.

We argue that the growth of magicians – and potentially workhorses – is crucial to driving structural transformation, while powerbrokers need to be kept in check. The role of powerbrokers in this scenario is to provide inputs, such as electricity and road infrastructure, that facilitate the growth of magicians and workhorses. Regulating the market power of powerbrokers is important to ensure that essential inputs are provided to magicians at reasonable cost.

Relationships with elites in African cities

We collected data and conducted key informant interviews with several enterprises in our six focus cities, along with speaking to business elites, political elites, city leaders and so on. Broadly, what we found is that powerbrokers tend to have fairly closed relationships with business elites and working elites. In other words, at the city level, only a few firms regularly engage with bureaucratic or political elites. These are also what we call ordered relationships – in essence, the relationships are reliable, and each party knows what they are getting.

We find that these kinds of closed and ordered relationships with powerbrokers can be problematic, for two main reasons. First, they can lead to situations with a lot of collusion, rents being shared and, in some cases, even corruption. This is not a good thing, and often means that powerbrokers are not really under pressure to supply good quality inputs to magicians and workhorses. Second, because powerbrokers are in this closed relationship with political and bureaucratic elites, they receive a lot of attention and the elites do not have the same level of interest in magicians and workhorses.

Conversely, workhorses and informal enterprises tend to have disordered relationships with local elites and city officials. This creates an unstable business environment which is not conducive to economic development. Consequently, it is unsurprising that in African cities, we tend to find very small household enterprises that do not grow or employ other workers. As for magicians, they are key drivers of structural transformation, but we find very few of them in African cities.

Wanted: More magicians

So, why are magicians missing in African cities? In our view, there are two main reasons.

First, they are not of strong enough interest to political and city elites – in part because they are not yet of a notable size or scale and there are not enough of them. Second, they need good infrastructure, which is currently lacking in these cities. They need ports, electricity, and business environments to facilitate their growth. And the absence of these essential conditions is, of course, partly linked to the lack of interest from political and city elites.

This is something our research has uncovered as fundamentally important in understanding why we have not yet seen structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa, despite rapid urbanisation. To drive structural transformation in African cities, we need to find a way to build an environment in which magicians can grow and nurture stable and predictable relationships with elites.

Watch our structural transformation explainer video with Kunal Sen:

Read the domain report
Read the research summary
Read the conceptual analysis paper

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Header photo credit: Erik Hathawa / Unsplash. A market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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.

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]]> Uncovering the politics of informal settlements in African cities https://www.african-cities.org/uncovering-the-politics-of-informal-settlements-in-african-cities/ Mon, 07 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=6884 A recent webinar drew on a study undertaken by ACRC researchers to explore how development processes in informal settlements in Accra, Freetown, Harare and Kampala are shaped by their differing political settlements.

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The growing literature on the politics of development in African cities has made significant advances in recent years, drawing attention to the often-unexpected ways in which the politics of democratisation, clientelism and ethnicity are playing out within specific urban contexts and how this shapes prospects for development therein.

Recent political economy analysis by ACRC in 12 African cities has sought to contribute to this literature by exploring the potential of political settlements analysis to add value to these and other debates through its emphasis on the interaction of formal and informal institutions and the distribution of power in society.

A webinar, hosted by The University of Manchester’s Global Urban Futures research group in September 2024, drew on a four-city study undertaken by ACRC researchers to explore how development processes in informal settlements in Accra (Ghana), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Harare (Zimbabwe) and Kampala (Uganda) are shaped by their differing political settlements.

We find that the approach does offer some comparative traction, particularly in terms of which actors and structures hold power within and around informal settlements, and the level of engagement between national political actors and informal settlements, and how this shapes issues of tenure security and the provision of goods. Our within-case analysis problematises some of the claims made in the literature on political clientelism and finds that the influence of ethnicity is contingent on how political power is instrumentalised by ruling elites.

We agree with Holland (2016) that “forbearance” offers a useful way of capturing not only the important legal dimensions of political informality but also by offering a typology that goes beyond a focus on the use of clientelism to co-opt low-income communities. It captures both how the wealthy/politically connected are benefitting from current approaches to urban governance and development and also the conditions under which non-clientelist forms of political engagement with urban citizens might start to emerge in African cities.

Panellists:

  • Sam Hickey (overview)
  • Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai (Accra)
  • Braima Koroma (Freetown)
  • McDonald Lewanika (Harare)
  • Peter Kasaija (Kampala)

Chair:

  • Tom Gillespie (Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester)

Watch the full webinar recording below.

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Header photo credit: Random Institute / Unsplash. An informal settlement in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Note: This article presents the views of the author 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.

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]]> New research: Identifying opportunities for urban transformation in Harare https://www.african-cities.org/new-research-identifying-opportunities-for-urban-transformation-in-harare/ Tue, 20 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.african-cities.org/?p=6755 ACRC has published a new report exploring the political dimensions of urban development in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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ACRC has published a new report exploring the political dimensions of urban development in Harare, Zimbabwe. Authored by George Masimba and Anna Walnycki, the paper synthesises key findings from research undertaken by in-city researchers, analysing how Harare’s political settlement and city systems shape its urban development domains. It aims to provide an overview of the political economy of development in Harare and identify priorities for future action research and interventions.

Harare’s political terrain is highly complex, providing both challenges and opportunities for transformative urban progress in the city. Post-colonial decentralisation in Zimbabwe has led to de-racialisation but not democratisation, with local government institutions having little autonomy and enduring significant interference from central government.

Over the last two decades, Harare’s infrastructure has largely collapsed – connected to national-level macro-socioeconomic and political developments. With reconstruction requiring an estimated $10 billion, Zimbabwe’s political isolation at the international level has left the city unable to secure funding to address critical systems failures. The research findings show the contested and contingent nature of urban systems in Harare, with hyperinflation, exclusionary regulatory frameworks and a growing population only compounding these difficulties.

Against this backdrop, the report explores findings from four urban development domains: informal settlements, land and connectivity, neighbourhood and district economic development, and structural transformation. Within every domain, informality was cited as a binding constraint, with the recommendations made in this study highlighting the need for council-led integration, regulation and institutionalisation of informal practices.

Informal settlements

The nexus between informal settlements and politics in Harare is much debated. Low-income areas are sites of political contestation, with elites making critical decisions and ordinary residents facing the consequences. As well as dealing with inadequate basic services, low-income urban residents have to cope with everyday challenges of land tenure precarity – including evictions and demolitions.

There are more than 60 informal settlements in Harare. Despite strong ties with political elites, grassroots political structures are often not recognised at higher levels of government. As a result, politically connected local actors have become adept at navigating formal authorities in their struggle for land tenure security. While many upgrading and regularisation processes have been led by politically aligned groups in informal settlements, other actors – including central government – have also been involved and there are examples of successful participatory initiatives.

Land and connectivity

Areas of high-density housing – mainly for low-income residents – have grown significantly over the last two decades in Harare.

The research finds the land and connectivity domain in Harare to be characterised by competitive land authorities, stressed physical planning systems, strategic infrastructure gaps and fragile urban land management. These difficulties have driven the city’s failure to optimise land for development and led to a struggle with policy and administrative structures.

The authors argue that joint action between the city council and national government is key to resolving strategic land conflicts and regularising settlements legally within Harare’s jurisdiction. This has the potential to open pathways to secure tenure and formal urban land administration in the city.

Structural transformation

Harare has witnessed rapid urbanisation, but little growth. Deindustrialisation and informalisation of the economy, originating from massive GDP loss between 1999 and 2000, have been worsened by disruption arising from the Covid-19 pandemic. Many workers lost their jobs and incomes, and more than 76% are now employed informally.

The city is in a precarious financial situation, due to national macroeconomic challenges and inconsistent fiscal transfers from central government over the last 20 years. New avenues to finance social services and critical infrastructure are urgently needed to drive an economic agenda that in turn catalyses growth-enhancing structural transformation.

Yet, while the situation seems bleak, the research highlights myriad opportunities to recapture development and push for change. By working closely with city authorities and national government, there is scope to take advantage of “low-hanging fruit” – such as creating a new vision for the city by developing a new spatial transformation programme to guide urban development. Support will be needed if Harare is to develop an overarching vision – but discussions are already underway.

Neighbourhood and district economic development

With 37% of the nation’s urban population living below the poverty line, Zimbabwe’s informal economy plays a significant role in poverty reduction, job creation, income, livelihoods and food security enhancement. As Zimbabwe’s primary economic and commercial hub, Harare attracts residents from surrounding areas, who contribute to an informal sector accounting for 58% of employment in the city.

Household microenterprises (HMEs) are a prominent fixture in Harare’s informal sector, but there is little research into the challenges they face. Reliable information around the scale, magnitude, character and spatial distribution of the informal economy is limited by a lack of coordination across government ministries, public bodies and local authorities. HMEs also face obstacles in the form of inadequate labour protection and social security provisions for informal workers, along with weak collective bargaining and representation of rights.

A number of current reforms are identified in the report – some taking place already, as well as potential interventions. These include the launch of the Informal Sector Policy (SME) in 2023, the opportunity afforded by membership associations to inclusively reshape the informal sector, and the growth in grassroots collective savings as an instrument for informal traders to access funding.

 

The research highlights that development processes in Harare are inseparable from politics, meaning that politically nuanced approaches and sustained commitment from elites are critical to confront urban challenges.

Read the full report
Read the research brief

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Header photo credit: VV Shots / iStock. Busy traffic on Samora Machel Avenue in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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.

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