Empowering young leaders in the city

The “Empowering youth for civic activism and urban citizenship” workshop brought together more than 50 youth leaders, civic activists and volunteers, with a focus on leadership, advocacy, urban governance and digital activism. The organisers prioritised interactivity and inclusivity, with panel discussions, open Q&As, breakout sessions, group work and role-play exercises fostering opportunities for the youth participants to share knowledge and experiences. Expert speakers from institutions and organisations including HIPS, the Somali Public Agenda and SGEM led the sessions.

Each day of the workshop centred on a core theme: foundations of urban citizenship and governance; developing civic activism skills; and advocacy, lobbying and durable solutions.

Day 1: Foundations of urban citizenship and governance

The workshop opened with remarks from Deka Abdullahi, deputy director of management and operations at HIPS. She outlined the key objectives of the workshop and highlighted the importance of equipping young people with valuable skills, knowledge and insights to contribute to their personal and professional development.

Afyare highlighted Mogadishu’s significant democratic shifts, along with some of the major challenges facing the city today – including corruption. He emphasised the need for reform and transparent systems to address issues with stalled developmental progress, governance, inefficiencies and a lack of trust in leadership.

During the session’s interactive components, the youth participants shared concerns around their lack of representation under the 4.5 clan power-sharing model, as well as their perspectives on the role of young people in upcoming elections. Along with expressing a strong sense of responsibility and excitement about the potential of proposed election reforms, they discussed how youth can contribute to ensuring transparency, accountability and fair representation during the electoral process.

The final session of the first day was delivered by Mohamed Hajir, political pillar coordinator at the Ministry of Interior, Federal Affairs and Reconciliation, who emphasised the importance of equipping youth leaders to contribute meaningfully to the city’s governance. He explained the different city systems, such as water, electricity, housing and education. He highlighted that by equipping young people with knowledge and skills, and enabling them to understand and actively engage with social systems, they could play a more meaningful role in shaping Mogadishu’s future.

Day 2: Developing civic activism skills

After an introductory exercise that encouraged participants to consider what type of leader they are, Zainab Hassan, founder and executive director of SGEM, and Afyare Elmi led the group in exploring key aspects of leadership. Highlighting the significance of self-reflection, integrity and responsibility, they shared insights and real-life examples with participants about the skills and mindset needed to become future changemakers.

“Before this, I didn’t think about what kind of leader I am. When I see my personality result, I understand more how I can help my community. Maybe I don’t talk too much, but I listen, and that entails leadership.”

Social media specialist Ali Nur Salad then led a session on leveraging media for digital activism. Sharing his personal experience of being arrested for using social media to challenge government narratives and influence policymaking, he talked about how digital activism can amplify voices, raise awareness and influence sociopolitical outcomes. An interactive discussion then covered a range of practical strategies – such as crafting compelling messages and building online coalitions to engage with diverse audiences. Participants also presented their own ideas on how to use platforms like TikTok to share the perspectives of underrepresented communities.

The day closed with a presentation from Mahad Wasuge, director of the Somali Public Agenda, who provided a detailed analysis of the security situation in Mogadishu and specifically youth gangs, followed by a summary of the key takeaways from Zainab Hassan.

Day 3: Advocacy, lobbying and durable solutions

The final sessions were designed to help the youth participants develop their knowledge and practical skills in civic engagement, advocacy campaigns and durable solutions for internally displaced people (IDPs). After a review of the discussions so far by Afyare Elmi, Zainab Hassan presented on civic rights and responsibilities – emphasising the role of young people in advocating for change, the importance of civic duty, and how effective leadership can drive social transformation.

Zainab Hassan and Shabaz Abdulqadir, a planning and development specialist, then led a session on advocacy and lobbying, examining core principles and practical strategies, and highlighting the importance of well-structured campaigns in influencing policy decisions. Building on the strategic framework provided by the facilitators, the youth participants then applied these strategies in their own group exercises, crafting policy proposals and practicing persuasive communication techniques.

“Shabaz’s session made me realise I can be a role model in my neighbourhood by educating others about their rights.”

Abdi Ismail Samatar, a Somali scholar and current senator in Somalia’s Upper House, also delivered a lecture on the role of youth in state-building and the critical contributions young people can make in a volatile region.

Mohamed Hajir led the final session of the workshop, looking at the challenges faced by people living in informal settlements and IDP camps in Mogadishu. Four young researchers who have conducted research among the city’s IDP communities also shared their insights and reflections.

Beyond the workshop

All in all, the workshop provided an effective platform to increase civic awareness and provide a stronger sense of responsibility among the youth participants – particularly regarding their rights and roles as young, urban citizens. They were not only supported in developing advocacy, leadership and digital activism skills, but also in fostering stronger networks among other young people, youth organisations and community stakeholders – laying the groundwork for ongoing collaboration.

Beyond the workshop, the organisers identified a need to create ongoing engagement platforms where young people in Mogadishu can build their skills and knowledge – such as online forums or mentorship programmes. In addition, strengthening partnerships with local authorities could help to ensure that youth initiatives align with broader governance reforms and have a lasting impact on the community.

Photo credits: Zakariya Abdulkadir

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.

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.

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.

Explore further:

• The land and connectivity domain report
• Podcast: why do land brokers matter in African cities?
• Webinar recording: Urban land in Africa

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.

Header photo credit: znm / iStock. A young woman walking through an informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda.

Generative AI was used to help draft this blog post:

We uploaded the full youth and capability development domain report to Google NotebookLM and asked it to summarise the key mental health findings and their implications for development practice. The draft post was then edited by the ACRC communications team, before being approved by one of the lead authors of the report.

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.

Mogadishu – as the capital of the Somali government – is at a crucial crossroads, dealing with intricate political, security and development challenges. A new report by Afyare A Elmi and Faisal N Ali synthesises the key insights from ACRC’s research on Mogadishu’s urban development.

Rapid urbanisation has led to a surge in construction and escalating land prices in the city. At the same time, Somalia’s unresolved constitutional issues impact the governance of Mogadishu. The presence of al-Shabaab, along with the rise of youth gangs, adds to the city’s security dilemmas.

The report focuses on politics, city systems, and four key domains: land and connectivity, informal settlements and internally displaced people (IDPs), safety and security, and youth capability development. The authors examine how the distribution of power in Somalia influences development and the prospects for developmental reform in Mogadishu, and analyse the systems by which actors and agencies attempt to sustain and/or improve urban life. The research involved interviews, focus group discussions and document analyses.

Political settlement

The political settlement in Somalia is influenced by clan-based power-sharing, federalism, regular elections, and the threat from al-Shabaab. The survival of the federal government in Mogadishu largely depends on the presence of the foreign peacekeeping forces and international financial support.

Formal power in the city is embedded in the federal structure. The mayor and deputies are appointed by the sitting president, and district commissioners are appointed by the mayor. The city authority has limited authority in terms of decisionmaking. Clan dynamics and informal power-sharing arrangements play a significant role in local governance.

International financial assistance is the backbone of elite patronage and political rivalry in Mogadishu and throughout Somalia. In this topdown, internally mediated political settlement, it is primarily the elite who reap the benefits of the status quo. City politics mirrors national politics, characterised by a fragile power balance, patronage, economic rentseeking and unpredictability. The concerns, needs and voices of ordinary Somalis are ignored, resulting in failure in terms of service delivery.

Urban systems

Mogadishu’s systems are at varying stages of recovery from the recent extended civil war, with the government developing policies related to system governance. Prior to the war, most systems were under the control of the central government, but now, private companies and donors are also involved.

The report looks at the following systems: education, water, energy, transport, food distribution, waste management, finance, health, and law and order. Through a systems approach, it explores intersections between these systems and how they are impacted by the city’s complex political landscape.

Domains

In terms of land and connectivity, the report highlights the complexities of land ownership and usage in Mogadishu, influenced by historical claims, clan affiliations and informal settlements. It examines the city’s infrastructure, including roads and communication networks, and how these impact economic activities and access to services.

The authors also discuss the challenges faced by residents of informal settlements and IDP camps, such as inadequate housing, lack of basic services and vulnerability to evictions. They also look at efforts to integrate these settlements into the broader urban framework, to improve living conditions and access to services.

Safety and security challenges are another key focus, including the threat from al-Shabaab and the impact of clan-based conflicts. The paper explores how these issues affect social mobility and daily life for residents.

The report also highlights the importance of education and employment opportunities for youth in Mogadishu, addressing the gaps and challenges in these areas. It examines various programmes and initiatives aimed at empowering youth and enhancing their capabilities.

Developmental challenges

The report analyses and identifies critical developmental issues in Mogadishu and anticipates challenges in addressing them equitably and sustainably, both environmentally and fiscally. Key issues include the undefined security structure of the city, prevalence of youth gangs and the political economy of public service privatisation.

Improved governance, better infrastructure and inclusive polices are highlighted as key to creating a more stable and prosperous city. The report suggests viable solutions, taking into account obstacles such as contested governance, security concerns, urban infrastructure deficits, planning failures and the taxation system. The authors advocate a holistic approach to urban development, considering both formal and informal practices.

Header photo credit: Amina Mo / Unsplash. A street in Mogadishu, Somalia.

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

By 2050, it is projected that African cities will become home to an additional 950 million people – all of whom will need housing.

This rapid population growth in Africa’s towns and secondary cities has been accompanied by the explosion of informally designed housing, as formal housing supply markets and systems struggle to accommodate the growing demand for affordable housing.

A new ACRC report – authored by Miriam Maina, Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael, Alexandre Apsan Frediani and Ola Uduku – outlines findings from the housing domain research, which was implemented in seven African cities: Accra, Ghana; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Lagos, Nigeria; Lilongwe, Malawi; and Nairobi, Kenya.

It highlights challenges facing the housing sector across the continent, focusing on the need to improve the quality of informally delivered housing as well as to deepen the reach of formal housing and financing.

Background

The housing challenge, or crisis, in many urban areas is characterised by a shortage of units to meet ever-growing demands and large-scale deterioration in quality of existing urban housing stock. This is exacerbated by other growing issues, including poor governance, limited resources, climate change and scarcity of local materials.

The limited affordability of existing formal housing stock forces many low- and middle-income households to find alternative solutions through informal processes and systems. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that government subsidies or programmes for producers and consumers fail to effectively address affordability constraints.

Yet the housing challenge in African cities is far from homogenous. Different countries and regions are experiencing different patterns to their urban transition, themselves shaped by diverse historical, social, political and economic trajectories.

To identify pertinent housing challenges in individual cities and enable cross-comparisons, the housing domain team examined city systems and politics. Research was conducted mainly through in-depth, politically and historically informed case studies, selected by local research leads and relevant stakeholders, in line with specific city contexts.

Housing production and value chains

The domain research findings highlight the interlinked nature of the housing production ecosystems and value chains – from procurement of materials to their use in building systems, and the labour involved in producing and using them.

The report argues that existing housing research and practice:

• Fails to engage with the power relations and asymmetries that shape the nature of the housing sector in different contexts;
• Only engages minimally with the impacts of prolonged inequalities in the housing sector (including social, spatial and economic inequalities, gender imbalances, urban poverty and climate change impacts from current building materials);
• Fails to unpack the housing experience for different actors – including low-income households and those with different characteristics, from gender and age to nationality – as well as the hybrid (formal and informal) nature of actors’ access to networks.

Implications for urban reform

Human settlements, including all forms of housing and shelter, are key to delivering sustainable urban development. Improved shelter and quality of life for all of Africa’s urban population are integral in enhancing national socioeconomic development and low-carbon urban transitions.

In the domain research, three opportunities emerged as critical for transforming housing production systems – and human settlements by extension:

1. Addressing governance and institutional coordination within the public sector;
2. Stabilisation and support for urban rental markets;
3. Tackling intersectional challenges in the building and construction sector.

By focusing on these issues, housing reform coalitions could drive the realisation of housing justice for marginalised communities in African cities.

Header photo credit: Hannah van Rooyen. A housing development in Mbezi Msumi, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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

By 2050, half of Africa’s population will be under the age of 25. This makes young people key to development outcomes across the continent’s cities, with youth often regarded as the “makers or breakers” of the future.

A new ACRC paper presents research into the challenges facing young people as they transition to adulthood in five African cities: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Kampala, Uganda; Maiduguri, Nigeria; and Mogadishu, Somalia.

ACRC’s youth and capability development domain research aimed to investigate commonalities in youth capabilities, as well as the political and systemic influences that shape them, across diverse urban contexts.

The authors of this paper – Olha Homonchuk, Elizabeth Dessie, Nicola Banks, Katja Starc Card, Susan Nicolai, Nansozi K Muwanga, Imrana Buba, Zainab M Hassan, Haja R Wurie and Eyob Balcha Gebremariam – uncover prevalent systemic barriers hindering young people in African cities from fulfilling their potential, particularly within social welfare systems and politics.

Young people in the cities studied emphasised the importance of quality education, vocational skills training programmes, financial services, health services and political participation. The research revealed that while youth have high stakes in political settlements, they also have little power – undermining their ability to influence and improve the social systems affecting their livelihoods.

The five cities studied were chosen because they have youth-majority populations and have been affected by conflict. City-level research teams drew on secondary and primary data collection, with primary data collected through individual interviews and focus group discussions with participants ranging from 15 to 30 years of age. Research teams were committed to distinguishing between the experiences of different vulnerable groups of young people – including young migrants and those living in refugee camps – as well as documenting how these challenges differ based on gender and socioeconomic status.

Key findings

The capabilities of young people are hindered by a number of factors:

• Political settlements that exclude young people and restrict their influence on policy agendas and ability to hold government agencies accountable;
• Insecure labour markets, characterised by under and unemployment, nepotism and corruption, financial exploitation and sex discrimination – with many young men joining militia groups or organised youth gangs to meet social and economic needs, and young women more likely to encounter exploitation and sexual discrimination during job searches;
• Limited opportunities to acquire skills, with poor quality formal education and vocational skills programmes that lack relevance to the labour market – plus private provision for the better off perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities;
• Little mental health support for symptoms caused by the stress of conflict and economic insecurity – leading to substance abuse as a coping mechanism – as well as severely restricted access to reproductive health services.

Policy implications

Our findings highlight the need for urban policy reform. Multisectoral youth programmes need to be broadened to incorporate youth skills training and mental health support. As a first step, it is crucial to assess the existence of long-term, locally-led initiatives of this nature that can be expanded or scaled up.

Young people need protection and support in labour markets, particularly those vulnerable to exploitation in informal apprenticeships. Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) curricula should be regulated, to address quality differences in such programmes.

Meaningful inclusion of young people in decisionmaking is also required. Youth often find themselves forced to align with existing power networks to access any benefits at all. Youth empowerment and capability development projects need to meaningfully collaborate with young people during research and programme design phases. This would support the creation of sustainable interventions that are relevant to young people and meet their needs.

Header photo credit: AnjoKanFotografie / iStock. Young people outside an electrical shop in Kampala, Uganda.

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.

Header photo credit: Andi Edwards / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). New road bypass between Entebbe and Kampala, Uganda.

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.

ACRC has published new research, exploring land and connectivity in six African cities: Accra (Ghana), Bukavu (DRC), Kampala (Uganda), Harare (Zimbabwe), Maiduguri (Nigeria) and Mogadishu (Somalia).

Urban land is a crucial economic, environmental and social resource in African cities. It is also highly politicised, frequently becoming a source of conflict and a factor in growing urban inequalities. Often dysfunctional and under-resourced systems of land administration have to engage with highly inequitable colonial legacies, widespread speculation and forms of elite capture, placing huge pressures on the sector.

Authored by Tom Goodfellow (University of Sheffield), Abdifatah Tahir (University of Sheffield), Liza Rose Cirolia (University of Cape Town) and Ransford Acheampong (The University of Manchester) in collaboration with city-based researchers, this report discusses findings from a six-city comparative study. The research explores how the nexus between land and connective infrastructure is shaping the way land is valued, used, transacted, fought over, managed and taxed in African cities.

Its main focus is on how land challenges intersect with connectivity – with the development of transport and mobility infrastructures, and with digital infrastructures that can change the way land is used, valued, exchanged and managed. Exploring what this can reveal about the realities of land value creation, extraction and capture – as well as the technopolitical dynamics of land administration – the report presents policy implications for urban reform.

Research approach

The authors conducted a selective review of literature on urban land and infrastructure in African cities. Six largely qualitative city studies were produced, each led by an expert with a long track record of work in the specific city. These studies draw on secondary sources (such as policies, government documents, reports, existing studies), interviews with key stakeholders (such as officials, land brokers, community representatives and developers), and the authors’ extensive experience and observations in the sectors. The research in each city covered a wide range of issues, around three central themes:

1. Land tenure, administration, management and conflict.
2. Taxation, land value and value capture.
3. Infrastructures and networks related to transport, mobility and digital connectivity.

In addition, a series of cross-city workshops brought together city domain researchers and the core team, to co-develop the framework and co-integrate the findings.

The report draws together crosscutting findings, considers some of the ways in which urban land and connectivity sits within the political settlement, and finally reflects on the findings and their interlinkages, presenting implications for urban reform and for future research priorities.

Key findings

• Land values are driven by multiple factors often overlooked in conventional property development and value capture models.
• Many societal actors are involved in capturing the rising value of urban land, including various forms of brokers.
• Urban growth and residential development often proceed particularly rapidly in areas without connective infrastructure – in contrast to planning assumptions that urban growth is stimulated by increased connectivity.
• Systems for property taxation vary massively, making cross-city learning challenging.
• Digital innovations feature heavily in land systems and can make a difference to “low-hanging fruit” in terms of land registration and taxation.
• Three types of politics – land, territorial and institutional – are evident throughout the domain, with their relative weight differing, depending on the nature of the political settlement.
• Different forms of land politics coexist, but some dominate in particular cases.

Implications for urban reform

• Reform approaches may need to work more on building government legitimacy versus state capacity, depending on which individuals and agencies are seen as the primary “land-grabbers”.
• The varied balance between land politics, territorial politics and institutional politics in different cities has implications for reform prospects.
• Finding ways to engage with land brokers and other intermediaries will be crucial to reform efforts.
• Policymakers should maintain awareness that technical interventions can mask or even worsen existing political and institutional conflicts.

Header photo credit: Andi Edwards / iStock. A road in Kampala, Uganda in the wet season.

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.

Date: Monday 20 May 2024

Time: 13:00-14:30 BST / 14:00-15:30 SAST / 15:00-16:30 EAT  

Register: bit.ly/ACRCUrbanLandWebinar

Summary: In many African cities, land is governed by a complex arrangement of actors – public and private, formal and informal, local and international. In the context of speculative land markets, porous bureaucracies and conflicting transaction records, land governance has remained hotly contested. Reform efforts aimed at optimising systems or addressing injustices have often had to confront these conflicts, engaging directly with questions of power and politics in the urban land space. 

As part of ACRC’s land and connectivity domain, a team of researchers undertook detailed studies in six African cities, with a keen eye on the relationship between land administration and governance, land value and markets, and land reform efforts.

Chaired by Tom Goodfellow and Liza Rose Cirolia, this webinar will draw on research conducted in Accra (Ghana), Bukavu (DRC), Harare (Zimbabwe), Kampala (Uganda), Maiduguri (Nigeria) and Mogadishu (Somalia), focusing on the following questions:

• How do these multiple and contested land governance arrangements “present” in different cities? Who is involved and what roles do they play? What are some of the key historical forces and contextual factors that have shaped the emergence of these players and the establishment of these roles? What are the politics of these arrangements – in other words, how is power established, maintained or lost by different actors and where do key sites of contestation sit? Do these actors draw on, for example, social contracts, the law, violence, finance or other sources of power and legitimacy to establish themselves? 

• What factors are shaping land value in the different cities (in particular where there are rapidly changing land values)? Taking account of the contestation discussed in the early sections, how is this value being captured, and by whom? What processes and technologies are supporting this capture and how just or unjust is the outcome? 

The event will begin with an overview of the research aims and design, as well as previewing some of the headline crosscutting comparative findings from the ACRC land and connectivity domain report. This will be followed by two panel discussions in which city researchers from some of the six cities will provide an overview of key findings in relation to the themes above. Finally, we will consider implications for urban reform and future research.

Header photo credit: David Attricki / Pexels (via Canva Pro). Aerial shot of buildings and road in Accra, Ghana.

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.

Header photo credit: CCODE Malawi. Aerial view over an informal settlement in Lilongwe, Malawi.

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.