By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

Most of Africa’s urban population do not live in large cities. They live in thousands of small and intermediate urban centres. So how many of these can you name? When we think of urban change and urban issues, is it only the relatively few large cities that come to mind?

On that note, has this blog series focused too much on large urban centres, especially Africa’s 100 largest cities? Did the list of Africa’s 20 fastest growing cities by annual average growth rates in the previous post produce some surprises, as it featured many relatively small cities, which are poorly covered (or absent) in the literature?

Considering rural and urban populations, most of Africa’s population either live and work in small or intermediate urban centres, or depend on them for access to goods, public and private services and markets. They are the urban centres with which most rural people and rural enterprises interact. Many small and intermediate urban centres are also critical nodes within national and regional transport and communication systems. Most are centres of some government services, such as schools and healthcare.

Relatively small, yet mighty

Across global regions, two to three times more people live in urban centres with fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, than in 10 million-plus mega-cities. If we count all cities with a million or more inhabitants as “large” cities, then 64% of Africa’s urban population lived outside these in 2020.

What is striking about this table is the similar proportions of the urban population in the 1-5 million, 500,000-1 million and 300,000-500,000 categories across the three regions. The big differences between regions are in the percentage of the urban population living in the largest and smallest cities.

Distribution data gaps

There are no UN statistics on the distribution of the urban population across different-sized urban centres below 300,000 inhabitants. It would be useful to know more, for instance, about the role of urban centres with under 50,000 inhabitants, or under 20,000 or under 2,500 – which might enable us to identify small towns that are agricultural service centres, for instance.

A review of 32 censuses in Africa that list all urban centres and their populations shows that small and intermediate urban centres form a significant part in most national populations.[1] Urban centres with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants generally constituted between 5% and 10% of their nation’s total population; this proportion was exceeded in Guinea Bissau (2009), Mali (2009), Mauritius (2011) and Rwanda (2011).

Between 3% and 7% of the national population generally lived in urban centres with 20,000-50,000 inhabitants; this figure exceeded 7% in Benin (2013), Botswana (2011), Mauritania (2013) and Niger (2012).

These census lists also remind us of just how many urban centres there are – many African nations have hundreds of them. We are reminded too of how many of these have fewer than 20,000 inhabitants:

• Egypt had 224 urban centres with over 10,000 inhabitants, according to a 2020 estimate.
• Nigeria had 145 urban centres with over 40,000 inhabitants in 1991 (more recent censuses are considered unreliable) and several hundred more by 2020, if using the 20,000 threshold.
• In South Africa, the 2011 census reported 220 urban centres with more than 13,000 inhabitants.
• In Congo DR, 102 urban centres with more than 20,000 inhabitants were reported, according to a 2004 estimate.

Urban definitions

Definitions are important here. If a government chooses to define urban centres as settlements with 20,000 plus inhabitants, then many small urban centres are being counted as rural. If the urban definition is settlements with 200 or more inhabitants, then many (rural) villages are being classified as urban centres

Each national government has its own urban definition, which means that international comparisons of nations’ urban populations and urbanisation levels are of limited validity. Most urban definitions are based on population thresholds or administrative status, or a combination of these. But population thresholds vary, from a few hundred to 20,000.

So, all countries have settlements with between a few hundred and 20,000 inhabitants that can be classified as small urban centres or large (and very large) villages. A nation’s urbanisation levels are influenced by the extent to which these are designated as rural or urban areas. If a country uses the threshold of 20,000 inhabitants, then many urban centres are classified as rural. Thresholds vary markedly:

• Congo DR, Ethiopia and Sudan use the 20,000 inhabitant threshold;
• Benin, Cameroon and Uganda use 15,000;
• Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania use 10,000;
• Central African Republic and Congo use 5,000;
• Burundi uses 2,000;
• Niger, Namibia, and Sao Tome and Principe use the much lower threshold of 500.

For IIED’s research, small urban centres were defined as those that had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants and intermediate urban centres as those with 20,000-100,000 – but with a caution, in that urban centres with key intermediate roles may be larger than 100,000 in nations with large populations. By contrast, less populous nations may have important intermediate urban centres with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.

It’s a small town world

So welcome to the world of small and intermediate urban centres – for which there is so little data but still so much debate on how they should be defined and studied. We do know that all countries have settlements of between a few hundred and 20,000 inhabitants that can be classified as small urban centres or large (and very large) villages. Nations’ urbanisation levels are influenced by the extent to which these are designated as rural or urban areas by national governments.

Work with local partners 

I have been part of several research initiatives on small and intermediate urban centres, working with partners and partner institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The most ambitious of these was carried out more than three decades ago. Led by Jorge Hardoy from IIED-América Latina, we looked at demographic, economic, social and political change for small and intermediate urban centres in regions in India, Nigeria, Argentina and the Sudan. These studies covered the last 100-150 years, to allow us to better understand long-term patterns and influences; a summary of the research findings was published in 1986.

We also prepared an annotated bibliography summarising the key literature on this topic at the time.[2] One notable issue within the literature was the contrast between highly detailed and in-depth case studies of particular urban centres with little interest in comparisons with other urban centres and more policy-oriented literature, with many generalisations (and recommendations) whose validity could be questioned.

Part of the research entailed interviews and dialogues with local politicians and civil servants in a range of intermediate urban centres in Kenya. In one urban centre, I asked the town clerk, “What is key to the town’s success?” He replied, “A strong frost in Brazil.” (The town was a service centre for coffee – frost would cut Brazil’s production and push up world prices). This awareness of international interconnectedness was before the internet too.

There were also assessments of development programmes in a range of small and intermediate urban centres in India and Uganda. We looked at the role and work of the Ugandan Homeless People’s Federation and its partnerships with local governments in Jinja. The issue raised here, and in discussions in other intermediate cities, was the importance of good working relations between local government and their low-income population – especially with organisations formed by the urban poor

Then there was the research supported by the Urban Africa Risk Knowledge programme (Urban ARK) in the township of Karonga in Malawi. This is interesting, since it is a substantial town (more than 50,000 inhabitants) but has almost no government to address statutory duties. This is perhaps the most important issue for small and intermediate urban centres – the vast gap between their statutory responsibilities – that typically included primary and secondary education, public health, town planning, roads and transport, sanitation and drainage, street lighting, and solid waste disposal – and their capacities. Here, and in so many other urban centres, there is a huge gap between local government responsibilities and what is actually done.[3]

What catches the attention in these and other small and intermediate urban centres I have worked in is how each has a complex history, being shaped by a mix of internal and external influences. Other urban centres may have comparable influences but the particular mix of local context and responses are unique to each urban centre. What is also different in small urban centres is the desire of the mayor and or civil servants to engage with us unlike in large cities.

How might intermediate urban centres have flourished if there had been a real decentralisation of power and resources, and local government had had the funds and capacities to meet their responsibilities?

Nigeria provides an interesting case in this regard. Has its decentralisation through growing numbers of states (and state capitals) over the last few decades produced a more decentralised urban population?

IIED’s journal, Environment and Urbanization, has encouraged submissions on small and intermediate urban centres. Over the last five years, nine papers on small and intermediate urban centres in Africa have been published:

Kisumu (Kenya)

• S Simiyu (2016). “Determinants of usage of communal sanitation facilities in informal settlements of Kisumu, Kenya”, Environment and Urbanization 28(1).

Bergrivier (South Africa)

• G Ziervogel, E Archer van Garderen and P Price (2016). “Strengthening the knowledge–policy interface through co-production of a climate adaptation plan: Leveraging opportunities in Bergrivier Municipality, South Africa”, Environment and Urbanization 28(2).

Karonga (Malawi)

• M Manda and E Wanda (2017). “Understanding the nature and scale of risks in Karonga, Malawi”, Environment and Urbanization 29(1)
• D Brown (2020). “The strengths and limitations of using hospital records to assess environmental health in Karonga, Malawi”, Environment and Urbanization 32(1).

Mzuzu and Karonga (Malawi)

• RH Hom, A Kamangira, M Tembo, V Kasulo, H Kandaya, PG Van Enk and A Velzeboer (2018). “Sanitation service delivery in smaller urban areas (Mzuzu and Karonga, Malawi)”, Environment and Urbanization 30(2).

Anonymous Tanzanian town

• K Nganyanyuka, J Martinez, J Lungo and Y Georgiadou (2018). “If citizens protest, do water providers listen? Water woes in a Tanzanian town”, Environment and Urbanization 30(2).

Ugandan secondary cities

• H Mackay (2019). “Food sources and access strategies in Ugandan secondary cities: An intersectional analysis”, Environment and Urbanization 30(2).

Gobabis (Namibia)

• G Delgado, A Muller and R Mabakeng (2020). “Co-producing land for housing through informal settlement upgrading: Lessons from a Namibian municipality”, Environment and Urbanization 32(1).

Hawassa (Ethiopia)

• F Hassam, E Grant and S Stevens (2020). “Understanding shelter from a gender perspective: The case of Hawassa, Ethiopia”, Environment and Urbanization 32(2).

[1] See: D Satterthwaite (nd), “Outside the large cities: The demographic importance of small urban centres and large villages in Africa, Asia and Latin America”, IIED Human Settlements Discussion Paper, Urban Change 3. PDF available online; and D Satterthwaite (2017), “The impact of urban development on risk in sub-Saharan Africa’s cities with a focus on small and intermediate urban centres”, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 26: 16-23. PDF available online.

[2] See: S Blitzer, J Davila, JE Hardoy and D Satterthwaite (1988). “Outside the large cities: Annotated bibliography and guide to the literature on small and intermediate urban centres in the Third World”. London: IIED Human Settlements Programme. PDF available online.

[3] See: MZ Manda (2014). “Where there is no local government: Addressing disaster risk reduction in a small town in Malawi”, Environment and Urbanization 26(2).

Header photo credit: officek_ki / Getty Images. Nouakchott is the capital and largest city of Mauritania.

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.

It is striking how few of the world’s fastest growing cities are also among the largest. This is also the case for Africa – looking at the list of Africa’s fastest growing cities in Table 1, many of these cities were previously unknown to me.

And where were cities such as Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam and Lagos that have shot up the African (and global) largest city rankings and are often said to be among the fastest growing cities in Africa (and the world)? The largest cities must have been among the fastest growing cities in the past, otherwise they would not be among the largest cities today.

What we measure turns out to be the key. Table 1 lists the cities with the largest average annual population growth rates. But if we measure annual average increments in city population, a completely different list of cities emerges – see Table 2.

Measuring city populations

A city’s population growth is usually measured by its annual average population growth rate. But city and national governments need to know the absolute change in population each year, as this is the number of newcomers (by birth or in migration) needing housing and public services.

Perhaps surprisingly, we get so used to discussions of fast-growing cities that perhaps we forget to look at slow-growing or even shrinking cities. Of the 1,860 cities included in the UN database, for 2000 to 2020, 107 had populations that were declining or not growing, but only two of these were in Africa (Qacentina in Algeria and Bulawayo in Zimbabwe).

Which cities are analysed?

Any list of the fastest growing cities will be heavily influenced by the selection criteria used. Tables 1 and 2 draw from the UN Population Division’s database, which includes all cities that had 300,000 or more inhabitants in 2018. By 2020, for the 20 fastest growing cities, only five (Abomey-Calavi, Abuja, Nnewi, Matola and Mwanza) had reached a million inhabitants. Only these same five cities were among Africa’s 100 largest cities. Evidently then, many of the fastest-growing cities are still relatively small.

Looking at Table 1, Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, features because it concentrates power and wealth in the largest economy in Africa. Unusually, it is likely to remain one of the fastest growing cities in Africa in terms of both criteria – annual population growth and annual average increments in population.

Among the other cities in Table 1, three (Matola, Abomey-Calavi and Ruiru) are suburbs of larger cities, one is within a larger city (Gwagwalada within the Federal Capital of Nigeria) and nine are provincial/state capitals (Mwanza, Lokoja, Malanje, Cuito, Mekele, Songea, Bunia, Kabinda and Mbouda). In each of these cities, there are varied and ever-changing specific local contexts and subtleties, and changing external influences. For instance, people who had been evicted from their homes in Abuja accounted for part of the very rapid growth in Gwagwalada. The population and economy of Bunia is influenced by the large military base for the UN peacekeeping force located there.

Changing criteria

If we had used a lower population threshold as a criterion for inclusion, this would have changed the list of the fastest growing cities. This can be seen in City Population’s country reports, which include all urban centres. They show some smaller urban centres with population growth rates that are much higher than those in Table 2.

The world’s largest cities never appear in lists of the world’s most rapidly growing cities if population growth rates are used to compile this list – although they inevitably did so when they were smaller. The larger a city’s population at the beginning of any period for which population growth rates are being calculated, the larger the denominator used to divide the increment in the city’s population. So it is not surprising that most of the cities in Table 1 had a relatively small population in 2000. All had fewer than a million inhabitants; four had fewer than 100,000.

Short-lived growth

When reviewing inter-census changes in population for all urban centres in a country, there are often small cities with very rapid population growth rates for one or two census periods – much more rapid than the cities in Table 1. Many small cities have doubled their population in ten years – for instance, as they take on new government functions or develop as tourist centres.

But most do not sustain this very rapid growth; if they did, they would become large cities. A very large city of 15 million is not going to grow to 30 million in a decade – although some very large cities have doubled, or close to doubled, their population in the last two decades, including Kinshasa, Lagos, Luanda and Dar es Salaam (see Table 2).

Cities with the largest increment in population

If we consider the absolute number of people added to city populations each year, the largest cities figure prominently as the most rapidly growing cities. The scale of their population increment is astonishing: Kinshasa acquiring an average of 410,000 new residents a year between 2000 and 2020; Cairo 364,000; Lagos 354,000 (see Table 2). Cairo is an example of a city that has a relatively low population growth rate (2.2% a year over 20 years) yet a very large increment in its population.

Very large cities, with more people moving out than moving in during 2000-2020, still had large annual average increments in their populations, because of their very large size and rate of natural increase. Some caution is needed, however, when comparing increments in population between cities, because boundary extensions, or changing city or metropolitan government systems (which produce different boundaries) often include large populations that were not previously considered part of a city.

Future growth?

There is a great enthusiasm for lists of cities and their populations’ rate of change. For example, an IIED blog with a focus on the Global South was our most-read blog of 2020 – achieving significantly more hits than an excellent series about how community-based organisations are addressing Covid-19 in informal settlements

“League tables” of cities need to be drilled down to work out what is really going on – and what all this could mean for the future of African cities more generally. Is Africa really going to have dozens of 10-million-plus mega-cities, as some projections suggest? Mega-cities need mega-economies.

We need studies of cities with depth and detail, a strong knowledge of local context and the capacity to engage low-income groups and local authorities. Providing these for a range of cities is at the centre of the African Cities Research Consortium’s work, with the first set of city scoping studies now available to download.

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 David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

Following on from our previous discussion on the deficiencies in official data needed for planning and governing cities, this blog looks at how city governments and community organisations are turning to other data sources.

When city governments do not get local census data and are not served by household surveys, there are other sources of relevant data. These include service providers’ records – for instance, people served by the water utility or using a government health centre. But are these records available to local government, and how good is their coverage? They have no data on unserved households, which often represent a high proportion of a city’s population.

Where censuses are done well, and their data is made available to local governments and civil society, they are the most inclusive data source, as they cover every household. However, an article in The Economist noted that some high-income nations have replaced censuses with the data that government already has – for instance, on individuals’ health, employment and residence. This won’t work for those where no such records exist, or those who live in an informal settlement without a registered address. This often this means that 30-50% of the population in cities in the Global South – and, for some cities, more than this – are invisible.

Many city governments have responded to deficiencies in official data by collecting their own. This includes efforts to draw together all the relevant data held by different departments within city government to provide a common database from which all can draw; or working with the universities in their cities.

Participatory processes: voice and data

Participatory processes can also tap into the knowledge and commitment of the people engaged, to create new information sources. For instance, participatory budgeting (PB) brings the knowledge of those who engage in the neighbourhood, sector or city-wide discussions that set priorities for local government for what is done and funded. An assessment of the impact of PB on basic services in 20 cities included four African cities and sub-municipal electoral districts: Ampasy Nahampoana in Madagascar; Dondo in Mozambique; Yaoundé Commune 6 in Cameroon; and Rufisque Est in Dakar, Senegal.

It may seem odd to include participatory budgeting in discussions of data availability. Data on service provision is meant to inform local government – and to provide the data needed to address deficiencies. But data on deficiencies in basic service provision can also come from a city government’s engagement with citizens and their community organisations, as in participatory budgeting.

To give an example, the participatory budgeting council of Commune 6 in Yaoundé was chaired by the mayor, and included civil servants, civil society actors and private sector representatives.

JD Nguebou, who took part in the discussions, notes: “Participatory budgeting modifies relations… budgetary decisions depend upon citizens’ decisions. It has an influence on budget. Another major change is that people’s voice became meaningful, and elected politicians listen more to citizens.”

PB therefore ensures that democracy is not only about votes, but also about voice and the data that voice can contribute.

Remote sensing

Over the last two decades, new methods have been developed to map informal settlements from satellites. High-resolution satellite maps have proved very useful in improving the quality and detail of city maps and can provide data on building characteristics, site layouts and urban expansion. But, by themselves, these tell us very little about who lives and works in the settlements mapped or about the quality of public services – and nothing about the residents’ needs and priorities. They can, however, provide the base map for informal settlements and for guiding data gathering by residents. This can be combined with data from censuses, service providers and health systems, if these are available.

Research findings can also address the lack of data. There is a large and rapidly growing literature on cities that brings depth and detail to all the issues raised above. It is from detailed case studies that we learn about the less visible factors. While this type of research can enrich our understanding, it cannot provide needed city-wide data. But there are three important exceptions.

The first is the research of the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) in informal settlements in Nairobi. This includes two demographic and heath surveys that had the depth and detail of the conventional Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) but that focused on Nairobi’s informal settlements. They provided a mass of valuable data on health and determinants of health (including basic services) for each informal settlement – see Table 1. This is disaggregated data that a conventional DHS cannot provide. And it shows that informal settlement dwellers have under-five mortality rates of 8-30 times the rate in high-income nations. Hopefully such data will spur change to address this.

The second is building a detailed city-wide database on risks from a combination of newspaper reports, hospital records, and databases or records of government departments. This draws on the DesInventar methodology that was developed in Latin America – but is now applied in many other regions – as illustrated by a report on Ibadan. Excluding public health risks for which data is scarce and incomplete, road traffic accidents, crime, violence and flooding constitute the most serious hazards in the city of Ibadan.

The third exception is community-driven mapping and data collection. This data source is provided by grassroots organisations and federations which map and survey their informal settlements. perhaps the most surprising and most transformative new source of city data, as many cities have a third or more of their population scattered across dozens or hundreds of informal settlements, for which there is little or no data. Perhaps as remarkable as this community-led process is the global network of slum/shack dweller federations that are using this process and sharing their experiences in developing it. They have also formed a secretariat to support them: Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), who are core partners of the African Cities Research Consortium.

There are now over 30 national federations who are SDI affiliates using these methods – to produce the data they need for their discussions and plans and to get the attention of city government. They include ten African federations (Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe) that have achieved national or citywide scale and have worked with governments to secure and develop land for the urban poor.

These are federations of informal savings groups, in which most savers and savings group managers are women. They developed the methodologies to document and map informal settlements and have applied these to thousands of informal settlements in over 500 cities. Much of this is part of SDI’s Know your City campaign. The federations have demonstrated their capacity to do this in settlements that have long been ‘invisible’. They overcome residents’ hostility to data gatherers because it is being done by them and documents their priorities.

These maps and data are also invaluable for city governments. When a city government agrees to support the upgrading of informal settlements, the federations carry out the equivalent of censuses, with each household interviewed and each dwelling numbered and located on a map and recorded, using GIS.

To give one among dozens of possible examples, the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia developed the capacity to undertake enumerations and mapping of informal settlements. With support from the national government and a local NGO, it developed the Community Land Information Programme to profile and map all the informal settlements in Namibia, covering more than 500,000 people without secure land tenure.

In Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, the Kenyan Federation, Muungano wa Wanavijiji, has been commissioned by local government to develop an upgrading programme. Community-led data collection has served not only the planning but also the many discussions and the difficult task of generating agreement among around 100,000 households on a range of interests. More recently, SDI mapping has been used by the Kenyan national government as part of its Covid-19 response.

A key part of the development of community-led surveys and enumerations in Africa is the experiences of their sister federations in Asia and the many learning exchanges between them. Also important were contacts with the Asian Coalition for Community Action that supported community-led enumerations or surveys and many innovative projects that also improved the working relationships with local governments.

For cities with informal settlements, by far the best, most detailed and most comprehensive data has come from their residents’ community organisations and federations. This data is collected to inform and catalyse action and to develop good working relationships with city governments. So the ‘slum’ censuses they design and implement are their census, their data. And, crucially, this data serves their plans and priorities.

Further reading:

• Over 50 papers on community led enumerations

Header photo credit: SuSanA Secretariat / Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Iron sheet and mud houses in Mathare, Nairobi.

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.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

How do you plan, manage and govern a city with no data about most of the population, most enterprises, most workers, most housing and often most land transactions and land use changes?

How do you run an effective healthcare system with no local data to inform you on the most serious illnesses, injuries and causes of premature deaths in homes and workplaces in your locality? This blog looks at the massive gaps in basic data for most cities (and city districts) in Africa and why these exist.

What we see, hear and can measure

In a previous blog, we noted how long and detailed Wikipedia profiles of cities in Africa paid very little attention to informal settlements and the lack of provision for basic services evident in most cities.

So much of what is going on in cities is invisible or only partially visible – and unrecorded. It is common for cities in Africa to have 30-80% of their population in informal settlements for which there is little or no data. This usually means no maps, no official street names and no registered addresses. Also no data on housing conditions or on provision for water, sanitation, drainage and basic services.

There is a comparable lack of data about informal enterprises – what they are and what they do. And, more broadly, there is the lack of data on the informal economy, despite its importance for the city economy and even greater importance as the source of livelihoods for most of the low-income population. In high-income nations, employers have to report on employee deaths, serious injuries or illnesses and extended periods off work, but this does not work for informal enterprises and may not function at all. So occupational health and safety issues are ignored.

We know much more about the very visible aspects in cities that can not only be seen or heard but also recorded – counted or measured. You can count people, buildings, businesses, motor vehicles – and set up systems to record them. But in many cities, informal settlements and the people, buildings and enterprises they contain still do not get counted. Which also means that that residents’ needs are not articulated.

For some risks, data can be collected from specialist equipment – for instance, air pollution and temperature monitors. But we cannot set up monitors that automatically record each occurrence of diarrhoeal diseases or traffic accident, although they can be recorded (and monitored) through hospital or healthcare records. But this requires reporting systems that are often not in place or, if they are, have very partial coverage (and for instance, no data from informal healthcare providers).

We know less about many (less visible or invisible) factors that create or influence cities. These include capital investment and income flows in or out of a city (including remittances). For each city, these include informal (and often formal) labour markets, land prices and availabilities (especially in informal land markets) and the quality and reach of public services.

“Censuses are a public good”

It is part of the function of government to collect data needed for planning, managing, servicing and governing city populations and enterprises. Censuses provide valuable data on a range of indicators relevant to health, wellbeing and housing and living conditions. They are also unique in that they cover (or should cover) every individual and household. This means that they can provide data disaggregated down to each city – and far beyond this, to each street and to the smallest political/administrative divisions. Here, data can inform each local initiative.

So it is valuable for all levels of government and for citizens and civil society groups concerned with local issues – to be able to see (for instance) the quality of housing or of provision for water and sanitation in each street or ward/district. This is particularly valuable in showing exactly where the worst quality housing or the worst provision for water and sanitation are located. A Brazilian statistician (whose name I sadly did not get) made the comment that “Censuses are a public good”. In Brazil, census data is available to local governments and the public and for each locality. But in my travels in Africa over 35 years, I have asked many local politicians and city officials whether the national statistical/census office provides them with relevant local data and, invariably, the answer is no.

Unlike Brazil, most African census authorities do not make the disaggregated data available to the public or even to local government. They see themselves as serving national government, not local governments. Censuses are also expensive – which is why they are generally done every ten years. There are also many nations where censuses are not regular and some that have had no census for 20 or more years – see Table 1. For some nations, internal conflicts have made censuses impossible, including Somalia, Congo PDR and Eritrea. Estimates suggest that Congo PDR’s urban population has multiplied fivefold since its last census. Nigeria’s last census was in 2006; its urban population has doubled since then.

For some nations, there are also worries about accuracy; for instance, state governments inflating their population figures to get more funding from central government. For many, there are worries of completeness – for instance, the failure to cover most informal settlements’ residents because the interviewers are frightened to go to their homes and/or because there are no maps to guide them (as in these examples from Cairo).

Good health data should fill some of the data gaps. But in many cities, vital registration systems are not functioning or have limited coverage – depriving city governments of valuable data on premature deaths and their causes and locality – exactly what national sample surveys cannot provide. Also, how many hospitals and healthcare centres are keeping records that should form a key part of neighbourhood, city and national data on health? (This case study explores the strengths and weaknesses of using hospital records.)

Household surveys

Household surveys are much cheaper than censuses, as they draw data from far fewer households. The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHSs) provide great detail on health, population and nutrition. For instance, Nigeria’s 2018 Demographic and Health Survey runs to over 700 pages. DHSs have been implemented in most African countries and for many nations they are done every few years, so key trends can be assessed. But their data is not available for cities. The Nigerian 2018 DHS has no mention of cities. The DHS survey samples that are too small to be able to provide statistically valid data on individual cities, let alone data needed at neighbourhood level. They provide findings for urban and rural populations and sometimes by state – but this too is no use for city and sub-city governments.

Much of the data that governments and international agencies generate and use is from national sample surveys. This can also be seen in the data on provision for water and sanitation that is used to monitor progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These have become increasingly detailed in the range of indicators but remain very aggregated; coverage is reported for national, rural and urban populations. 

It is worth reminding ourselves that the United Nations is an inter-governmental organisation governed by and accountable to member states (national governments). Most UN agencies have a national government perspective to all aspects of their work. This includes the SDGs and how their progress is measured, and the Paris Agreement.

But much of what has to be done falls to city governments. In most nations, this requires city governments with more power, capacity, funding and accountability. Yet it has proved very difficult to get attention focused on this, with local governments having even been classified as among ‘other stakeholders’ in some instances. Recognising their importance as the core of government for not only local issues, but global and national ones as well, is imperative for gathering better, more representative data.

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.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

This blog considers what we know about Africa’s 100 largest cities – responding to the third blog in this series, which looked at what we don’t know. This is with a particular focus on the drivers and other influences that shape contemporary urban change.

The next blog in this series looks at how the lack of data on cities is invisibilising them and their populations’ needs.

Africa’s 100 largest cities

The distribution of the 100 largest cities in 2020 across countries is set out in Table 1. Forty-one countries have one or more of the 100 largest cities; 22 countries have one, and all but one of these are national capitals.

The concentration of the 100 largest cities in South Africa and Nigeria is not surprising, as they have the largest national economies. Egypt and Morocco are among the next largest; between them, these four nations have 40 of the 100 largest cities.

Capitals

Thirty-nine of the 100 cities are national capitals, while 43 are state or regional capitals, which means more than four-fifths of the 100 cities are national or regional capitals. The biggest cities that are not national capitals are: Dar es Salaam, Durban, Lagos, Johannesburg, Alexandria, Abidjan and Kano. But several of these are former capitals (Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Alexandria) or, in the case of Abidjan, a de facto capital.

Capitals are relocated when it suits those in power to do so – as discussed in the second blog in this series – usually for political or military reasons. The French created Niamey as the capital of Niger in 1905, then shifted the capital to Zinder in 1912. In 1926, prompted by Zinder’s proximity to the Nigerian border and its distance from French-controlled ports, they moved the capital back to Niamey.

Box 1: Basic data on the 100 cities

Range in population size

From the three most populous:

• Al-Qahirah (Cairo, Egypt) with 20. 9 million inhabitants;
• Lagos (Nigeria) with 14.4 million;
• Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) with 14.3 million

To the three least populous:

• Benguela (Angola) with 0.72 million;
• Oshogbo (Nigeria) with 0.71 million;
• East London/Buffalo City (South Africa) with 0.71 million.

Share of Africa’s urban population

The 100 cities had a total population of 242.5 million in 2020, out of a total urban population for Africa of 587.7 million. There are thousands of urban centres not in the top 100, whose combined population was 345.2 million in 2020.

Range of ages

From the three oldest: Tunis (Tunisia), Tripoli (Libya) and Al-Iskandariyah (Alexandria, Egypt), founded centuries BCE.

To the three newest: Abuja (Nigeria), Nouakchott (Mauritania) and Enugu (Nigeria), founded since 1950.

When cities were founded

Of the 71 cities for which we have dates:

• 14 were founded during the 20th century (all but three between 1900 and 1950);
• 26 were founded during the 19th century (14 of these between 1880 and 1900);
• Two were founded in the 18th century, five in the 17th century, four in the 16th century;
• 20 were founded before the 16th century.

Economy

We assume that these 100 cities have a large share of Africa’s economy, although there is no data on this. But we can see a diverse range of economic changes. Many of the 100 cities have undergone rapid economic growth, driven by oil and gas production, extraction of precious metals, jewels and other valuable mineral resources, and by the local demands these create for producer and consumer goods and services.

The inhabitants of these resource-rich regions usually derive little benefit, however. This underlies political tensions that fuel conflict and often generate large numbers of refugees and internally displaced populations.

Many large cities have ports that are (or were) important parts of the economy. Some served as provisioning centres – for instance, large fleets would routinely stop at Dakar on their outward and return journeys from India, to repair, collect fresh water and trade for provisions with the local people.

Cape Town was developed by the Dutch East India Company to play a comparable role for Dutch ships sailing to East Africa, India and the Far East. Today, most of the largest ports are within the 100 cities: Durban, Mombasa, Lagos, Abidjan and Tangier.

Tourism is important in many coastal cities and historic cities, especially in northern Africa and also, among the 100 cities, Cape Town, Mombasa and Zanzibar. Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia have the highest international tourist arrivals in Africa. Eight of our 100 cities feature in a list of top 100 cities ranked by international visitor numbers (including for tourism and business): Cairo, Johannesburg, Marrakech, Cape Town, Casablanca, Durban, Accra and Lagos.

Some cities, such as Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Abidjan, have become concentrations of international agencies. This gives rise to a concentration of highly paid international agency staff, whose demand for goods and services can intensify a city’s population growth. Ironically, most of these agencies do not fund initiatives in their city where most of the population lives in informal settlements with very inadequate service provision.

Aerial view of Dar es Salaam. Photo credit: Moiz Husein / iStock

Many cities lost out to colonial rule, but some grew rapidly as centres of administration and control. Dar es Salaam’s size and status were reinforced by its role as the administrative and commercial centre of German and then British colonial rule. After the French took Algiers in 1830, they made it their military and administrative headquarters. The Belgian government established Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) as its capital. Lilongwe and Kaduna were founded by the British and became important colonial administrative centres. Maiduguri was founded in 1907 as a military outpost by the British. 

Transport

New technologies transformed transport for people and goods – providing higher speeds and carrying capacities, better access to those wanting to travel or to send or receive goods, and lower costs. The development of transport infrastructure provided the means to extract valuable resources from the locality. But local populations often derive little or no benefit from this process.

At different times and places, camels, boats, ships, railways, roads, highways, bridges, pipes and air travel served the movement of people and/or goods and supported cities. Sometimes they competed (for example, road versus rail), and sometimes they complemented each other (such as roads serving railways, railways serving ports, and ports as provisioning centres for ships). Telecommunications systems have become essential for all cities to serve the movement of data and internet access.

Generally, transport costs became lower as new modes of transport were introduced. Demand for goods and for travel interacted with changing transport modes and costs. Camels across the Sahara could only take high-value, non-perishable goods, due to the time needed and the limits of camels’ physical capacity. So trade using camels would specialise in high-value, mostly light goods – spices, kola nuts, salt.

As described in an earlier blog, many cities grew as centres supporting camel caravans. But to note the obvious, camels were not used to transport coal, as it is too heavy and low value – railways were much faster and able to deal with large volumes and heavy weights of low-cost goods. Enugu could only exploit its coal when the railway arrived.

Some cities drove these changes, others were founded to serve them. And politics along with (external and internal) demand for resources shaped everything. Half of the 100 cities have ports, most have airports. 

Heavy investments in railways in much of colonial Africa brought new economic activities to cities that were on the railway system. Many of these railways were built to exploit and export valuable resources, and were also important for both colonial administrations and the quick movement of troops. National armed forces were concentrated in many cities, swelling local populations and economies.

Agriculture

Many cities’ economies grew from supporting high-value agricultural exports and the range of enterprises that support their growth, processing, packaging and transport. There is surprisingly little documentation on food and agriculture in regard to the 100 cities, except in cases where the city served a region producing crops or other agricultural products for national and international markets (such as Port Harcourt for palm oil during colonial rule). Apart from some city case studies, we know little about the agriculture feeding the 243 million residents of the 100 cities. Umuahia, Kaduna, Aba, Osogbo, Onitsha and Bobo-Dioulasso are among the 100 cities with important agricultural markets and associated agricultural services.

Other drivers of change

Contemporary urban change has many other significant influences and drivers. Extreme weather events, disasters and water shortages – to which climate change has contributed – are likely to become more extreme and more frequent.

For many cities, change is brought about by conflict and/or people displaced by conflict. Covid-19 and risks of other pandemics and the many life-threatening diseases – whose impacts get forgotten in the fight against the current pandemic – are having a profound impact.

One positive outcome of the pandemic could be a much wider recognition of the importance of well governed and adequately resourced local government and local civil society, including grassroots organisations and federations.

Sources: The text in this blog draws heavily on the profiles of the 100 cities in Wikipedia.

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.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

This is the first of four blogs, considering what we know (and don’t know) about Africa’s 100 largest cities. Also to come are blogs on the thousands of urban centres that are not in the 100 largest city list.

No surprises

A quick review of Africa’s 100 largest cities does not present many surprises. Most are in Africa’s wealthiest nations. Most are national or regional/state capitals. At least half have river or seaports. Many have had railway stations for decades and, more recently, airports and connections to highways. A large number have universities. All have profiles in Wikipedia including many that run to several pages.

Surprises

But if we take a more careful look, we may be surprised. There are cities whose populations have doubled or even tripled since 2000 (see Box 1) and whose governments’ budgets, bureaucracies and technical capacities are far too small to cope. We find cities where most of the population and workforce live in poor quality, overcrowded informal settlements lacking safe, regular water supplies and adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, healthcare, emergency services, electricity, schools, the rule of law and other vital services.

In other words, these are cities that are catastrophically failing to meet their responsibilities in public services provision – and it seems, from the limited data available, backlogs are growing. Data on health outcomes in informal settlements, such as infant, child and maternal mortality rates, are very rare. And all this in some of the wealthiest nations and cities.

We see how little attention is paid to reaching groups of city dwellers facing discrimination on the basis of gender, age or ethnicity/nationality, or groups with chronic health problems or special needs. Many cities have large numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons, who are not in camps and are now part of city labour markets/economies – they too often face discrimination. On top of this, current incapacities to address Covid-19 reflect decades of underinvestment in public services. 

Lack of data

A constant theme in this blog series is the lack of data on those city residents whose needs are unmet in the ways we have just seen. Official data sources are usually of no use to city governments, because they are from sample surveys that can only give aggregated statistics. They have no local statistics of use to local governments and civil society. There are usually limitations in other data sources, such as vital registration systems and censuses (these limitations will be the focus of a future blog).

This lack of relevant data means that the issues the data should inform are not addressed. How can a city government develop plans for improving water supplies without data on the quality of water provision to each household? Informal settlements usually fall outside any data gathering on service provision, even when they house 30-70% of a city’s population and workforce.

Aerial view of Ikoyi, Lagos. Photo credit: Reginald Bassey / Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mogadishu gets a detailed 16,000-word profile – but no mention of the very poor housing conditions and lack of basic services facing much of the population. Most live in 480 informal settlements spread across the city. A report in 2020 noted that housing consists predominantly of corrugated metal sheet shacks or temporary shelters made of sticks, plastic and fabric. These settlements often lack proper buildings and the most basic services (including access to electricity, water and sanitation).

Wikipedia is not averse to these issues – for instance, it has a detailed profile of Kibera, one of the largest informal settlements in Nairobi. So perhaps the point is not that contributors to Wikipedia ignore these issues, but that the data needed to cover them is not available.

What lack of data?

The lack of city and community data on how well needs are being addressed means that we do not know how well cities and city governments are meeting their responsibilities for public services. We do know, however, that innovative, well-resourced city governments working with their populations can do much to meet these needs and reduce the backlogs.

We have also learned that effective responses to Covid-19 need partnerships between local government and grassroots organisations. We have amazing examples of grassroots organisations striving to address the gap between services needed and local governments who partner them – many who are now uniting to fight Covid-19 and its economic, social and health impacts. But little funding is available for them. And there is generally little capacity in city governments and national and local and public health care services to work with them.

The next blog explores the drivers and other influences of contemporary urban change in Africa’s 100 largest cities. Future blogs will cover invisibilising cities and their populations – including the obsession with national statistics and international comparisons – and alternative data sources for cities and communities.

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.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

Most large African cities today were already well-established when colonial rule began to expand dramatically in the late 19th century. Most preceded the slave trade era too. This blog outlines the history of cities in Africa from 500 AD up to the late 19th century.

From existing sources, we glean evidence of a rich and varied urban history, even as we acknowledge that this history is incomplete. Kingdoms, empires and caliphates had capitals (and often regional capitals) going back more than 1,000 years (and longer if we were to go back to the Roman Empire). Some cities were also local or international religious or trade centres. Many cities combined these roles. And some, such as Tunis/Carthage, were even used for tourism by Romans who had holiday villas in and around the city, after Rome finally defeated Carthage.

Africa’s rich urban history

There are some striking similarities between Europe and much of Africa over the centuries, as empires, kingdoms and city states rose and fell – with obvious consequences for their capital cities and the cities that served them. There were cities that grew to serve prosperous agriculture, and cities greatly influenced by religious conflicts and wars (for Africa, especially the Muslim conquest of Northern Africa in the 8th century).

But cities were also centres of administration, scholarship, schools, trade, magnificent religious buildings (mostly mosques in Africa, mostly great cathedrals in Europe) and large flows of pilgrims. There are also vast differences – and great diversity among African cities.

Large cities in the past

We have population estimates for many African cities, showing so many substantial cities with long histories (see Table 1 for examples). Some were among the world’s largest cities of their time. But there are many large cities that have lost importance or have been abandoned. Al-Iskandariyah (Alexandria) was the capital of Egypt from its founding by Alexander the Great to AD 642 and became a centre of commerce and great intellectual activity. But, by 1777, it had become an insignificant fishing town of 6,000 inhabitants before later returning to be a large and important city. Perhaps there are many more cities still waiting to be discovered and acknowledged.

Table 1: Examples of large cities over time

The city of Fès in Morocco, for example, was founded in AD 786 and at its peak in 1200, it had 250,000 inhabitants. It was the national capital for long periods and a centre of religion and scholarship. The University of Al Quaraouiyine was founded in Fès in AD 859.

Cairo, founded in AD 641, has been Africa’s largest city for almost all of the last 15 centuries. Around 1340, almost 500,000 people lived there. It was the principal seat of Islamic learning and central to the profitable East-West spice trade.

Cairo has within its boundaries more ancient cities, including al-Fustat (city of tents) that became the first capital of Islamic Egypt in 641, al-Askar (the city of sections, or cantonments) and al-Qatta’i (“the Quarters”). Al-Fustat remained Egypt’s administrative centre until 1168, when it was burnt to prevent its capture by a Crusader army, and Egypt’s capital moved permanently to Cairo.

Western Africa

One key influence on cities in Western Africa was the empires that came to control large areas. Cities were their centres of government, trade and military power.

The Ghana Empire (c. 300 to 1100) grew rich from increased trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt, allowing larger urban centres to develop. Bamako became a major market town, and a centre for Islamic scholars, with the establishment of two universities and numerous mosques in medieval times.

The Mali Empire spanned the 13th to 17th centuries and ruled over 400 cities, towns and villages of various religions. Niani was the capital for 300 years; it reached its zenith as Mali’s political, commercial and caravan centre (gold, salt, kola nuts, slaves) in the early 14th century.

The Songhai Empire dominated the western Sahel in the 15th and 16th centuries. The city of Gao became its capital. Other important cities in the empire were Timbuktu and Djenné.

Among the best known of the sub-Saharan African urban cultures is the Yoruba culture. This included many large cities in what is today southwest Nigeria. Major cities include Ile-Ife, Oyo, Abeokuta, Ijebu-Ode, Akure and Ibadan. Ibadan was founded in 1829 and had a population of around 100,000 by the mid-19th century.

The documented history of the Yoruba people begins with the Oyo Empire, which became dominant in the early 17th century. It was preceded by Ile-Ife; between 700 and 900 AD the city began to develop as a major artistic centre. The nearby Benin Empire was also a powerful force between 1300 and 1850. A number of other cities, though non-Yoruba, were influenced by the Yoruba, including Warri, Benin City, Olene and Auchi.

Eastern Africa

Traditions of urbanism are most in evidence in Sudan (and Khartoum and Sennar), Ethiopia (and Aksum and Gondor) and cities along what came to be called the Swahili coast (including Mombasa). There were also ancient cities such as Kerma (in Sudan, which flourished as the first great urban centre of tropical Africa and was estimated to have 10,000 inhabitants in 1700 BC), Meroe, Suakin, Shendi, Sennar (‎on the Blue Nile in Sudan, described by a European visitor, as “one of the most important trading centres in Africa… regularly visited by caravans from Nubia, Darfur, Cairo, Fezzan, Bornu and Ethiopia”). Further east, former Swahili towns on the Benadir Coast, such as Mogadishu, Barawa and Marka, Lamu and Zanzibar, had by the 18th century become trade centres. 

Final note

This blog provides an introduction to the scale and nature of cities in Africa – but only up to the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the late 19th century, as different European nations expanded their empires. It does not cover the large and profound changes brought by colonial rule from the 1880s onwards (acknowledging too that colonial rule stretches back much earlier than this for some cities).

It has not dealt in any detail with the trade in slaves that had existed for thousands of years, but whose scale and impact increased so much through the development of the Atlantic slave trade. It is difficult to be dispassionate about the slave trade’s impact on cities. Certain ports became important when the slave trade to the Americas expanded dramatically and came to use ports in Western Africa (what was called the Slave Coast), rather than the long-established trans-Saharan trade routes (which were better suited to trade with Northern Africa, Europe and Asia). Some cities in west Africa fortified to protect themselves from capture. Ports that exported slaves from Africa include Ouida, Lagos, Aného (Little Popo), Grand-Popo, Agoué, Jakin, Porto-Novo and Badagry.

Most ports that served the slave trade are still urban centres but with small populations (under 100,000). Lagos and Badagry (in Nigeria), Porto Novo and Cotonou (Benin’s two largest cities), and Luanda (Angola) and Dakar (Senegal) were among the exceptions. Badagry, just down the coast from Lagos, was for a while larger and more important than Lagos. On Africa’s east coast, Bagamoyo (Tanzania) was founded at the end of the 18th century and became one of the most important trading ports along the East African coast, including trade in slaves.

Sources: This blog draws on the UN Population Division’s 2018 World Urbanization Prospects; Chandler, Tertius (1987), Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census, Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, UK, 656 pages; Bairoch, Paul (1988), Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, Mansell, London, 574 pages; and Freund, Bill (2007), The African City: A History, Cambridge University Press, 214 pages; Burton, A. (2001) ‘Urbanisation in Eastern Africa: An historical overview, c.1750–2000’, AZANIA: Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 36-37(1): 1-28. But its main source is Wikipedia, which has profiles of almost all the cities mentioned; most are long and detailed, including details of their foundation and development.

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.

By David Satterthwaite, senior fellow in IIED’s Human Settlements research group

We know relatively little about most of Africa’s pre-colonial urban history and the role of its cities. This is something especially pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet we can get a sense of urban history from diverse sources, including tales from travellers and explorers, material evidence of large cities, and import and export records. There are also dozens of cities with buildings and districts built centuries ago that still exist – especially mosques and medinas.

There is more written on social, economic and political issues on the continent or in countries within it, but less on what this meant on the ground for cities and their populations – and in turn, what city development meant for these issues.

Evolving city systems

Africa has a rich and varied urban history going back centuries, or more than 2,000 years for some countries and cities. Indeed, many of today’s large African cities were already well-established before colonial rule. Table 1 below lists the largest cities in Africa in 1800, including the population at that time, the year the city was founded and the rank among all cities in Africa in 2020.

It is worth highlighting that all cities for which we have the year they were founded pre-date European colonial rule. Only eight of these 34 largest cities are among 2020’s 100 largest cities, and five of these are in Northern Africa.

Additionally, while none of the African Cities Research Consortium’s 13 focus cities feature in the list of the largest cities in 1800, all are within the largest 100 for 2020. Five (Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Khartoum, Addis Ababa and Nairobi) are in the top 11 largest African cities.

The fundamental reshaping of the urban system and the location of the largest cities in all nations reflects the economic and political changes brought about by colonial rule – whereby colonial powers tended to avoid the largest cities – and post-colonial developments. City systems came to reflect more closely the government hierarchy, as the importance of state and provincial capitals grew in many nations, along with access to agricultural and mineral resources for export.

Hence, the political and economic changes imparted by colonial rule and post-colonial development created a new urban geography. Almost all the great historic cities described in the next blog still exist as cities, but with much less economic or political importance.

Africa’s largest cities in 1800 and 2020

One striking feature outlined below is how old most of Africa’s cities are. Table 1 lists the largest cities in Africa in 1800, their population at the time and the date they were founded – referring to the foundation date of a settlement that was not a city, or when an already existing city was classified as a city. Table 1 also gives the rank of these cities in 2020, allowing us to see how the 34 largest cities in 1800 fare in 2020.

Table 1: The largest cities in Africa in 1800

Table 2 shows the 34 largest African cities in 2020 – to compare with the 34-city 1800 list (in Table 1). As noted earlier, the 2020 list has few of the same cities as the 1800 list, and has far more cities founded in the late 19th and early 20th century by European powers or commercial interests. Table 2 also shows how the largest cities in Africa in 2020 rank in the 1800 list.

Table 2: The largest cities in Africa in 2020

Out of the 34 African cities that were recorded or estimated to have 20,000+ inhabitants in 1800, eight were in Mediterranean countries, although not all on the Mediterranean – much of the international trade was by overland routes, not by sea. Most of these urban centres had very long histories as prominent cities.

Of the 34 largest cities in 2020:

• Five were in Northern Africa (compared with 11 in 1800)
• 11 were in Western Africa (compared with 20 in 1800, and including five in Nigeria, compared with 13 in 1800)
• Six were in Eastern Africa (compared with two in 1800)
• Five were in Southern Africa (all in South Africa, compared with none in 1800)
• Seven were in Middle Africa (compared with one in 1800)

Distribution of the largest cities across nations

Figure 1: The countries with the highest percentages of Africa’s largest cities 

Figure 1 shows the countries with the highest percentages of Africa’s largest cities over the last 220 years. Given the scale and nature of economic, political and urban changes in Africa since 1800, there is perhaps a surprising extent of continuity.

Notably, Nigeria had the most cities for all years, although faced changes as some new cities became more prominent and some older cities – previously capitals of kingdoms and empires, and cities in the north, including those involved in the trans-Sahara trade, – lost importance.

Morocco and Egypt were also among those with the most cities for each year, but this has declined over 220 years.

Surprisingly, Congo PDR had none of Africa’s 100 largest cities up to 1950, and then seven of them by 2020. All seven cities were colonial foundations, with many established around mining for diamonds, gold and uranium. Consequently, it is often remarked upon as a country with vast wealth but very high levels of poverty.

Continuity and change

Of the 34 largest cities in Africa in 1800, eight were still in the 100 largest cities in Africa list in 2020, but with a lower rank, except for Cairo and Kano. Nine of the 34 cities were not in the 2020 cities list, but have more than 300,000 inhabitants today. So while cities can go up or down in the rankings, it is rare for them to lose significance altogether.

For instance, Sokoto may have fallen from the second largest city in Africa in 1800 to outside the top 100 in 2020, but it is still a substantial city with more than half a million inhabitants. Similarly, Meknes – Morocco’s capital before it moved to Rabat – fell from third to outside the top 100, but remains significant.

This is also the case for Oyo, Ife and Katsina in Nigeria. Cities that were to become Nigeria’s four largest cities in 2020 – Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt and Abuja – had not even been founded in 1800. Meanwhile, many cities in Northern Africa, including Sokoto and Katsina along with those involved with the trans-Sahara trade, slipped down the rankings as using ships for trade became cheaper and quicker.

Only Cairo had no movement down the rankings, while five cities had drops of 0-50: Kumasi, El Djazaïr (Algiers), Rabat, Tunis and Abomay. Eight fell out of the top 100 cities in 2020, six of which were in Nigeria.

Urban population growth over time

In 1800, Cairo was the largest city in Africa, with 260,000 inhabitants. In 2020, Cairo remained the continent’s largest city but with more than 20 million inhabitants. The 34th largest city in 1800, Kairouan, had 20,000 inhabitants, while the 34th largest city in 2020, Brazzaville, had 2.4 million inhabitants.

Figure 2 shows not only how the average size of Africa’s largest cities changed dramatically from 1800 to 2020, but also how this average size – 2.77 million in 2020 – is relatively small in comparison to the global average of 9.5 million.

Figure 2: Average population of Africa’s largest cities (1800 to 2020)

In 2020, the collective population of Africa’s 100 largest cities was 244 million – comprising just over two-fifths of the continent’s total urban population of 588 million – with cities from 39 different African countries featured in the top 100 list.

Although cities with more than a million inhabitants existed before 1800, they were very rare and none were in Africa. But, by 2020, there were 68 of them, with Cairo becoming the first African “million city” in the 1920s. So, from being very uncommon worldwide, most African countries now have one or more “million cities”.

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Sources: Almost all city and urban population statistics from 1950 onwards come from the UN Population Division’s 2018 World Urbanization Prospects. Almost all city population statistics prior to 1950 come from Chandler, Tertius (1987), Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census, Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, UK, 656 pages. This blog also draws on Bairoch, Paul (1988), Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, Mansell, London, 574 pages and Freund, Bill (2007), The African City:  A History, Cambridge University Press, 214 pages.

Notes: One limitation in international comparisons of city populations is that definitions of cities vary in how their boundaries are defined. A city’s population can be defined by the historic city boundaries, or boundaries based on the built-up area, or based on a political/administrative boundary, including the boundary of a much larger metropolitan area and perhaps a metropolitan planning region that is even larger. Of course, there are very large differences in city populations and rates of change, depending on which boundaries are used.

The UN Population Division makes a heroic effort to make city population figures more comparable by seeking to get figures for urban agglomerations. Their boundaries are defined as the extent of the contiguous urban area or built-up area. This definition could be applied to 55% of the 1,860 cities in the UN’s most recent World Urbanization Prospects, with the rest being on the city proper (35%) or the metropolitan area (10%).

Ultimately, the UN Population Division is dependent on data provided by UN member states and whatever definitions they use, meaning it is also hampered by the lack of censuses in many nations. Of course, for discussions of historic city populations, there were no censuses to draw on.

For Table 2 and Figures 1 and 2, the figures for 1950 onwards are UN statistics and there were more than 100 African cities. This was not the case for 1800, 1850 and 1900, so all cities with populations estimated to be at least 20,000 inhabitants were included.

Figure 2 overstates the average population of cities in 1950, 2000 and 2020, as it is the average size of cities that had reached 300,000 inhabitants by 2018. Many cities are smaller than this and if included would bring down average populations.

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.