Ola Uduku - ACRC

Can African Cities help to decolonise knowledge?

Hannah — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Since the start of the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC), we’ve been interested in trying to create more equitable partnerships and processes through the process. The rupture of the Covid-19 pandemic (which saw us establish ACRC almost entirely online) provided us with some opportunities, plus added impetus following reflections within the sector catalysed by the Black Lives Matter movement.

From the outset, we’ve been exploring ways in which we could decolonise the ACRC approach by helping to shift the culture and practice of knowledge creation, which is currently built upon hugely unequal power systems. Of course, we are not starting from scratch but building on traditions of knowledge co-production between diverse groups involved in urban research.

We’re fully aware of the inherent tensions and potential contradictions of trying to do this via a programme initiated and funded by the UK government with strict accountability requirements by the lead agency responsible for the contract. But as FCDO’s recent development strategy makes clear, the ultimate aim of programmes like ACRC is “unleashing the power of people and countries to take control of their own future”. It’s a goal we’re fully committed to, so we’re looking at how ACRC can be best organised to help deliver it.

As such, we’re focusing on three main areas:

Structural issues

The current phase of research is largely characterised by UK-based researchers leading or directing the work in a way that is consistent with the framework of the African Cities programme, with Africa-based researchers implementing within these boundaries. Within these constraints, we have sought to develop the space for community-based researchers, in addition to a range of contributions from African professionals and academics. For the next phase of work, as we move into nurturing urban reform, we need to ensure that ACRC’s agenda and work are owned by those in the cities in which we are active. This requires us to explore a more decentralised structure for decisionmaking and resource allocation.

Communication practices

Language is a powerful tool for communicating research, that can determine who benefits in multi-stakeholder partnerships such as ACRC. All forms of ACRC communications, including images, will be regularly reviewed to address potential unconscious bias issues. We also need to ensure that the dominance of the English language does not skew the understanding of specific experiences of inequalities and marginalisation within ACRC cities.

Methodological practices

In order to ensure co-production of research, local knowledge and experiences should drive the implementation of ACRC research, including spaces for methodologies that challenge Eurocentric approaches. African researchers must have their “voice” and agendas expressed in the agreed research processes and must lead the communication and use of results. ACRC approaches need to be intentionally empowering to all stakeholders involved in the research. This includes community-based researchers whose voice is often excluded in traditional academic practices.

None of this is easy. We’ve not got everything right so far, and many of the issues don’t lend themselves to immediate solutions. Balancing our accountability to both our funder (and ultimately UK tax-payers) and to the reformers we’re partnering with in African cities is a constant challenge. That said, we’re committed to continuing this dialogue throughout the programme and actively looking for practical ways to push things in the right direction.

To explore some of these issues, our uptake director Martin Atela and strategic alignment group member Professor Ola Uduku sat down with our communications manager Chris Jordan, to give their perspectives on decolonisation.

Transcript

The full podcast transcript is available below.

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Chris Jordan Welcome to the African Cities podcast. My name is Chris Jordan. I’m the communications manager with African Cities and I’m joined today in Nairobi by Ola Uduku, who’s from Liverpool University, and Martin Atela, who’s ACRC is uptake director but his day job is at the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research in Nairobi, PASGR. So thank you very much, both of you, for joining me.

Chris Jordan Really interested to get your thoughts and hear your experiences around issues of decolonisation. It’s an issue that has grown in prominence over the last few years, but I’m sure you both have kind of a long history and experience of dealing with these issues day to day, and it’s something that we’re trying to grapple with within the African Cities Research Consortium. So, Ola, if I could turn to you first. You’ve been working in development-related work for a long time. How do you come to the issue of decolonisation and particularly as it’s currently being conceived?

Ola Uduku Well, it’s a hard question, but I guess the whole decolonisation discussion is a long discussion, but it’s also part of a longer process. And I think probably in my academic life there have been times when issues around decolonisation have come up further and certainly since the Black Lives Matter movement, certainly in the UK, I think academically there’s been a significant push towards looking at how we decolonise the way we teach, the way we research and indeed the ways in which we see ourselves. So yeah, I’ve been engaged with it throughout and I think this is certainly a high point again where we’re being asked to really think carefully and it’s from everything from indeed how we teach undergraduates right through to postgraduate research and also the ways in which we frame our research questions. So yeah, it’s a continuing journey, I would say, and most of us are engaged with it in some in some fashion or the other, and I certainly support the process.

Chris Jordan And Martin, you’re based in Nairobi. You’re an African researcher. How do you come at these issues?

Martin Atela Yes. I think through working in the development field, PASGR is my third job, postgraduate, so to say. The issues of decolonisation, you sort of deal and reckon with almost in everyday relations, because most of the work involves working very closely with partners in the global South as well as partners in the global North. And most of our partnerships tend to be around issues around knowledge generation, issues around knowledge creation and the use of evidence for policy and practice. And decolonisation, as Ola rightly put, it’s not a new thing. It’s found a new growth, so to say, because of the Black Lives Matter movement. But even going back and looking at development discourse all through, it’s been at the centre of the conversation around, for instance, aid and how we do aid and development, how we do development assistance, how we do bilateral relationships. And it’s now more highlighted in research because I think academics and funders who fund academics and research are coming to terms with the reality of the fact that those relationships are never equal. And it is time if research processes have to produce the outcomes that they are intended for so that we make relationships a lot more equal and equitable.

Chris Jordan And I guess for all African researchers and academics, it’s a very personal issue, right? This is not just a theoretical, abstract sort of interesting thing. This is day to day reality.

Ola Uduku Yeah. I guess as African researchers, or at least as an African researcher or academic placed in a Northern university, it is our day to day. I mean, when the idea about positionality comes very much into the discussion, I mean, one is effectively employed by a Western body. One is interested in doing research in the South. And where does that place one in terms of both research, research subjects and also, if you like, for those whom the research is being done. And I think that’s probably a good way to bring in the work that the ACRC is doing, which is really, I think, beginning to work much more collaboratively and beginning to look at co-creation of research objectives. Certainly at the beginning of my time as a young academic, it was very much you went and did research there in the South, and it was development research, and there might be a small research fund to do it, but it was very clearly the there and the here, and the fact that this was being done as an aid project to a large extent. So I think that has changed over time, which is good, but there’s still that need to critically think about, you know, the I would call it the “symmetry”. Is it a really symmetrical relationship is there asymmetry, which is often the case.

Martin Atela Yeah. I suppose for, you know, an African academic or researcher based in Africa, you grapple with a number of things. The imbalance in the sense of research funding. So most of our research still is funded from organisations or institutions from the global North, as we would refer to them. And most of what is currently seen as top-tier journals where you publish that research are also based in the global North. So in a way, you’re doomed on both sides because funding is tied to specific ideas. If you look at most calls for proposals, the ideas have already been, you know, outlined for you. You’re responding to other people’s ideas. As you do the research there are conditionalities that are attached to it, so if you want to publish and compete with the global world, you have to publish in journals that have been given premium by, you know, sort of Western academics. So it’s a real challenge, but perhaps even more real in the sense that when we’re talking about decolonising knowledge and knowledge processes or even partnerships, we are starting from the point of view that there is a history and that history has shaped the way things have been done to the point where we are. And that realisation means that beginning to challenge power structures is often not a welcome move, and it means that it begins with you as an individual to self introspect and position yourself, rightly put by Ola, in all this conversation before even engaging with others in it. So it’s a very personal thing because some African academics lived through the process. Some of us have experiences through sort of bequeathed to us.

Chris Jordan So let’s turn to the African Cities Research Consortium, because some of the issues that you highlight, they’re present in this research effort. You know, we at The University of Manchester originally responded to a call from what was then DFID, you know, that kind of marked out the territory. And ultimately we are funded as a consortium by them. So I know you two have both been looking at some of the issues that we need to grapple with, if we’re going to do better as a consortium and if we’re going to move research practices forward. Could you just outline some of the terrain or some of the issues that a research consortium like ACRC needs to be grappling with?

Ola Uduku I guess in some ways, starting from the consortium itself, who are the partners? If we look at the banding of the consortium, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think most of our partners are from the global North. But then I guess it’s that as we put together the bid, I think there was a lot of consultation, but possibly again consultation from partners in all forms, from all those involved in what has now become the partnership. I think some partners were possibly consulted at a later point than others. Obviously, it’s very difficult to put in a large bid. But it’s interesting that as we’ve got to this stage, there are partners who are just beginning to understand the extent of the consortium. So I think at the get go, as the Americans would say, I think there’s an issue about making sure that all those involved have, I guess, at least equal knowledge and ideally equal participation in the task of creating the bid. That would be a start in terms of beginning to dissect things.

Martin Atela Yeah. I suppose ACRC like most research partnerships that bring together these different parts of the world would be grappling with not only the way it is structured, but the way it was created. And for me, I think that’s where the biggest challenge begins, that, Chris, you rightly put it, this was a call by FCDO that defined clearly what is needed. So what is the space for ACRC to deviate from any of that original thinking? So that has to be an ongoing conversation. And it means FCDO, if I could just use the blunt terms, the coloniser, has to be willing to engage with that conversation. And then, Ola’s referred to, you know, how did the partnership come together? We have to recognise that ACRC is made up of partners who enjoy very different capacities and powers. So Manchester for instance, is a highly resourced, globally known university, has been at the forefront of the development of some of the theories we are testing under ACRC; ESID, for instance, a ten-year plus project looked at political settlements and doing politics smartly. And then you bring in SDI, for instance, which is a community-based organisation with deep knowledge and expertise in engaging community at the local level. Those are very different dynamics. So it’s the consortium to find a way of sort of bringing everybody to the table and creating an atmosphere where each partner feels respected, trust can be built and recognise that indeed, we are dealing with an animal here, which is about unearning ways of doing things which we see were unequal. We recognise they are unequal.

Chris Jordan And I guess the other thing, just in practical terms to reflect on, is the experience we’ve had, we’ve all had over the last couple of years of the global pandemic. You know, as if issues of decolonisation and partnership and developing relationships of trust weren’t difficult enough already, we’ve all been stuck in our homes and, you know, two years in, just about this is the first time that we’ve all been able to get together and talk about this face to face rather than through Zoom. Just do you think for you, is there something about that? Have you noticed the difference in conversations when you’re face to face rather than mediated through a screen?

Ola Uduku Oh, definitely. I mean, I think that yeah, I mean, the world basically stopped or paused for at least the first nine months. But then again, in some ways, it again highlights the asymmetries in terms of as the world has got back to business, it is still much more difficult for the South to travel to the North versus the North travelling to the South. So that highlighting about yeah, the differences and divisions in the world in terms of how a global disease affects different places differently must come through the process of being part of ACRC. But I mean, the positives are that, as I have said anecdotally, the first place I heard about Zoom was back in Lagos in November 2019, well before the pandemic. So in some ways, some parts of Africa have been resourced enough in terms of the both the infrastructure and the technology to go onto Zoom. So that has been a positive in some ways. But now that we’re coming out of it, I can see the challenges, still for travel across for particularly our African partners. But it’s been positive definitely to be able to get back together, and it’s been really nice to be in a space together and out of the box, or the computer screen.

Martin Atela Yeah, I agree. Totally. It was amazing, to say the least, that groups such as ACRC could leverage on technology, could leverage technology to connect such a large group of people. Obviously, it comes with its own challenges. One that I would highlight, for instance, is the time difference. So the planning around most of ACRC’s workshops were done in consideration of the UK timings, the British standard time, and for a lot of researchers in Africa and other parts of the continent, they had to stay quite late in the evening to keep up with it. But for me, the opportunity to engage and not allow the pandemic to stop engagement I think overrides these challenges. The issue that Ola raised about I’ll just call it blatantly open discrimination around global travel, still does highlight the inequality that we face in the world. We saw it with HIV and now it’s even more highlighted with Covid and what we call, you know, the discrimination in terms of access to vaccines. Yeah.

Chris Jordan Yeah. And even before Covid, you know, it was difficult enough to get visas for African researchers who wanted to come and visit the UK or participate in workshops or conferences. So yeah, it’s a whole other podcast probably. I just want to turn finally to the agenda going forward. So lots of issues, lots of contradictions, lots of stuff that we’re just going to have to keep on addressing and talking about trying to find a way through. But what do you see as the sort of the positive agenda? What can we be doing as a research consortium to make sure that we really do try and do this research in a different sort of way?

Ola Uduku I think it’s building on what’s gone on so far. I think being able to have sessions like these, apart from the niceness of being face to face, really beginning to address difficult questions about power. Power and indeed, if you like, post-colony as opposed to colonisation. But I would always say in terms of research that I do, particularly in Africa, what is the legacy? So it’s that fundamental question about what’s really good is we’re talking about uptake and so on. So we’re saying the right words. But in reality, as the person I was sitting next to who’s part of the SLD group here, when a project ends, a good project means that the researcher really becomes part of that community, so it’s almost anthropological. And often the researcher has his or her own task and is seen as a very important elder or whatever in that community setting. But when the elder moves, who takes that role on? So if it’s a successful one, it’s back to the whole development discussion. A good development project means that it sustains itself when the developer or the person bringing the aid leaves. So it’s that embeddedness in the existing communities in which we are working with and how the ACRC consortium has its own future, which is not mediated by the North, it’s probably mediated by the cities that we’ve been involved in in the South and grows further.

Martin Atela A good point to start, actually. I remember. I think it’s one of the SDI members who put for us that challenge. What does ACRC want to be remembered for after the five or six years? And perhaps to respond to your question, Chris, what is it that we need to do to ensure that we do the research on the problem differently and better? But I think we have to, as a consortium, decide to go to Beth’s words, what is it that we can achieve? Right. So with very clear indicators around at the end of this five years, we committed to decolonise our processes and do our research better. Who will own the knowledge, you know, who will own the data? Yeah. What’s the balance or share of all of what do we call it, the intellectual property rights, to the publications that are coming out of this, not just to African scholars, but the community as well. Do they feel they own the data? Do they feel they own the solutions that are coming out of this? And for me, it would be a marker of success, of having done things differently, if in our 13 or the five or seven or eight last cities we can leave pointers of real changes that ACRC brought, you know, communities that our evidence transformed, examples of policies that benefitted from our evidence. The number of research projects that were genuinely led and co-designed by policymakers and community members and African researchers. That to me would be a true example of a well done global South/global North research project.

Chris Jordan Thank you. So it’s clear that we’re at the start of this conversation and hopefully something that we’ll come back to over the life of ACRC and beyond. Martin and Ola, thank you very much for joining me today.

Ola Uduku It’s been a pleasure.

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Securing the right to adequate housing in African cities

Hannah — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Urban development domains

ACRC’s analytical framework uses the concept of urban development domains to transcend both sectoral and traditional systems-based thinking. We define domains as fields of power, policy and practice that are relevant to solving particular problems and/or advancing specific opportunities in relation to cities.

This blog series delves into each of our eight urban development domains, providing an overview of their context within African cities and what we are seeking to interrogate and better understand through our research.

By Ola Uduku, Alexandre Apsan Frediani and Miriam Maina

A lack of adequate housing is one of the most prominent challenges facing urban Africa. Housing – whether in the form of informal or formal dwellings – is a basic human right, yet remains only an aspiration for most of Africa’s urban population.

Although Africa remains the least urbanised continent in the world, urbanisation is now growing at a faster rate in Africa than anywhere else on the planet. In 2015, more than 50% of the continent’s population lived in urban areas. This urbanisation process continues at an unprecedented pace, with predictions that by 2050, Africa’s cities will be home to an additional 950 million people.

Housing, human rights and wellbeing

Traditionally, the focus of housing research studies is on formal housing and upgraded informal settlements primarily as part of economic growth strategies. In contrast, within ACRC’s housing domain, we take a more holistic view of housing. We see housing as central to protecting human rights and to improving the wellbeing of low-income urban citizens. We intend to explore the qualitative and positive developmental processes that can be achieved through provision of access to, and the development of adequate housing at different scales – from individual- to metropolitan- level planning.

This is a different approach to current responses to housing, which focus on the need to provide mass low-cost structures that meet the bare minimum construction standards. Such developments often fail to recreate local community settings in which housing or shelter is part of a wider set of factors, resulting in improved health and wellbeing, vocational education and skills activities, which in turn link to locally based economic activities.

Providing good housing has a number of cross-cutting objectives, from improving health and wellbeing, to contributing to local sustainable building construction value chains and strengthening urban infrastructure development. It is also clearly influenced by land and finance domains, overlapping significantly with informal settlements and other social development infrastructure, such as health and education networks.

Metal worker on the construction site of a residential building in Accra attaches the reinforcing steel. Photo credit: fotografixx / iStock

Challenging traditional assumptions

In this way, ACRC’s housing domain team is challenging traditional housing assumptions. We are exploring sustainable construction processes and the housing delivery process from planning through to procurement value chains, and onto construction and acquisition processes. We will study individual exemplary houses, such as the Osae Addo and Lokko residences in Accra, Ghana.

Acknowledging the diverse and interlinked actors involved in housing production across the continent, we will also examine the role of non-conventional or traditional actors involved in housing design and delivery. These include women with limited formal education in supposedly “subordinate” roles (such as small-scale petty traders); and migrant communities who have set up local residential neighbourhoods, containing both formal and informal housing, and other infrastructure, such as schools, pharmacies and local shops, as found in refugee settlement areas in Accra, Ghana and Lagos, Nigeria. In addition, we will consider the often fluid relationship between the informal and the formal in African housing, considering what differences and continuum linkages there are between squatting, renting and home ownership.

Housing in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo credit: Abenaa / Getty Images

Rights-based approach

Our vision is that the formal housing sector can be part of a multidisciplinary and multi-agency process through which Africa’s urban population has access to improved quality of life. We expect to have strong disciplinary linkages to research into land and connectivity, health and wellbeing, informal settlements, and the cross-cutting themes of gender and climate resilience and its effect on future house building and upgrading. Conceptually, our focus is on exploring and developing our engagement with this rights-based approach to housing, from the individual- and community-led to private–state scales.

We are interested in how the formal housing sector might better link, and not simply overlap, with informal structures and processes to provide shelter. We will explore the potential for housing provision itself to link into local sustainable socioeconomic networks that create inclusive development and growth. We believe that there is a plurality of actors who are engaged in different modes and areas of housing production, at different scales and in different areas. This ecosystem is often non-formal and therefore overlooked, despite linking directly to and often underpinning the formal housing sector through its value and supply chain links, as is the case of cement procurement and distribution networks across much of Africa.

City-specific engagement

In our search for evidenced successful practice in other urban networks with similar challenges, we will undertake case study analyses of different forms of housing planning, design and delivery – across ACRC’s focus cities but also farther afield, including Latin America. We will be working closely with the consortium’s uptake teams on a city case basis, and hope to contribute to current urban policy development as it affects future housing planning in some of these cities.

In other cities, our engagement may be more with the procurement and design planning actors. Our role may be, for example, to challenge and advise on ways in which existing value chains might become more sustainable, work more to incorporate unrecognised actors, and become relevant to the future urban needs.

Holistic urban development processes

Ultimately, we aim to use our research findings from the housing domain to provide new insights into how our understanding of housing can be expanded beyond its value as an economic resource, to being central to human rights. We aim to highlight the integral part housing must play in holistic sustainable urban development processes, and in enhancing wellbeing, particularly for the poor and lower-middle-income residents of Africa’s rapidly growing cities. We believe our case study approach is an essential way to spread and embed this information for Africa’s future urban actors, planners and protagonists.

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The challenges of governing Lagos, the city that keeps growing

Hannah — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 07:00:00 +0000

By Ola Uduku and Taibat Lawanson

From its historical origins as a fishing village and the site of a pepper farm, to today’s bustling metropolis, Lagos has evolved into a complex agglomeration of people, settlements and vested interests.

As the economic powerhouse of Nigeria and West Africa, Lagos is projected to become the most populous city in Africa within the next 50 years. Reaching a population of 100 million from 15 million today. If recent waves of migration are anything to go by – from those seeking economic opportunities or escaping the climate crisis and insurgency in other parts of Nigeria – the projections may be underestimated.

Governing a city like Lagos is not a job for the fainthearted. It’s a city that is always growing, and with deep-seated socioeconomic inequalities.

We are part of the African Cities Research Consortium, a new initiative committed to addressing critical challenges in 13 cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Our recent publication sheds some light on the complexities of Lagos and why managing the city is a challenge in itself.

Governance struggles

Lagos faces many challenges; some are critical to understanding why metropolitan governance is so difficult.

Firstly, the geographical definition of what constitutes Lagos has become nebulous over time. The city’s urban land area continually spreads to absorb adjoining state, and now even national, boundaries.

This means that it is difficult to gain accurate data for short and long-term planning policies.

Secondly, the city’s governance structures – from local to state level – are unclear and don’t necessarily align in the ways expected. The local government system is essentially an appendage of the state government. It lacks autonomy as well as the technical and fiscal capacity required to perform its constitutional functions.

Power dynamics

Lagos bears the historical legacy of having been Nigeria’s longest established capital city. It started as a protectorate under the British colonial government and became capital of the colony and later of the independent Nigeria. It withstood the subsequent military coups, remaining the capital up until the movement of the federal capital territory to Abuja in 1991.

Despite losing its administrative capital status, Lagos remains by far Nigeria’s preeminent economic powerhouse. The city’s economy more than quadruples its nearest rivals – across Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa – in productivity, capital and infrastructure.

Its historical status and ongoing economic power provide the background for the city’s uneasy, and often tense, relationship with the national government which is where the power, revenue and resourcing decisions are located.

Furthermore, Lagos has a history of different political parties controlling different levels of government – those that run the state, and those that run the nation. As a result, policies and fiduciary allocations are often “lost” between conflicting governance systems.

The local government system is severely incapacitated. Instead, informal governance institutions have immense influence on everyday life in the city.

Inequality and informality

For the average Lagosian, these conditions result in a lived experience which delivers poorly on infrastructure and quality of life. Yet the city remains one of the most expensive places in Africa to live in.

The poor residents of Lagos live in sprawling informal settlements within the city core, or create new ones at the peripheral areas. The rest can be found in several gated communities that span the city. In both instances, self-governance is common.

Taxation from local to state level is poorly managed. Basic services, such as primary healthcare and public education, are under-resourced.

There’s an intricate web of informal governance systems that hold sway at the local levels. This results in a class of powerbrokers who oversee the provision of infrastructure in the city. Very few people or groups have the agency to engage with these gatekeepers to development.

Marginalised youth

Additionally, Lagos is a city of marginalised young people. The average age in Nigeria is 18.1 years. But many young citizens are not in education, employment or training. In Lagos, as in other cities, young people are confronted with poor governance, unemployment or underemployment, police brutality and a high cost of living.

The frustration of these young Lagos residents is visceral. Frustration-aggression and relative deprivation theories suggest that individuals turn aggressive when there are impediments to their route to success in life, especially when material basic needs are not met. The #EndSARS protests that paralysed the city for days in October 2020, ending in bloodshed, showed what can happen when such frustration plays out in the streets.

The government’s inability to investigate what actually went on, and attribute blame, has further added to the underlying tensions in the city.

People power

In all of these challenges, certain things are clear: the immense potential of the Lagos economy, the hope in the hearts of migrants that Lagos offers opportunities for a better future, and the community driven city-making practices of residents.

Our research at the African Cities Research Consortium seeks to investigate how these factors interact with complex governance frameworks. By doing this, we aim to identify which structures have been able to successfully navigate the complex layers of Lagos governance. In particular the local structures which support and deliver physical and social infrastructure for communities.

From these analyses, we hope to examine how bottom-up systems in Lagos – and ultimately in cities across Africa – can be better supported to deliver development and infrastructural change in a challenging and complex landscape.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Ola Uduku - ACRC

Can African Cities help to decolonise knowledge?

Structural issues

Communication practices

Methodological practices

Transcript

Read now

Sign up to ACRC’s e-newsletter for future updates:

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Securing the right to adequate housing in African cities

Urban development domains

Housing, human rights and wellbeing

Challenging traditional assumptions

Rights-based approach

City-specific engagement

Holistic urban development processes

Sign up to ACRC’s e-newsletter for future updates:

Follow us:

The challenges of governing Lagos, the city that keeps growing

Governance struggles

Power dynamics

Inequality and informality

Marginalised youth

People power

Sign up to ACRC’s e-newsletter for future updates:

Follow us: