urban reform - ACRC

Navigating different approaches to urban reform in Harare

Hannah — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Six pathways to urban reform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum for constructive engagement – from policy to implementation

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

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

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

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What can FCDO and other donors learn from ACRC’s approach to development?

Hannah — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts focusing on how urban reform happens and where ACRC fits into change processes. The first blog post focuses on how ACRC’s approach links to issue-based programming, the second explores urban transformation and the centrality of trust in politically engaged development programmes, the third takes a closer look at how ACRC adds value to urban reform, the fourth highlights how ACRC is helping build community capabilities to address urban challenges, and this fifth one outlines what donors can learn from ACRC’s approach to development.

By Diana Mitlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Wicked problems often require a reform coalition

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

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

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

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

3. Local leadership – and funding – is key

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

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

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

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

A role for “outsiders”?

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

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

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

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How does action research build community and state capabilities?

Hannah — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts focusing on how urban reform happens and where ACRC fits into change processes. The first blog post focuses on how ACRC’s approach links to issue-based programming, the second explores urban transformation and the centrality of trust in politically engaged development programmes, the third takes a closer look at how ACRC adds value to urban reform, this fourth one highlights how ACRC is helping build community capabilities to address urban challenges, and the fifth one outlines what donors can learn from ACRC’s approach to development.

By Diana Mitlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Working out the change that is needed

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

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

2. Broader engagement with the proposed solution

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

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

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

3. Gaining support from professionals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Embedding the process within other communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of capability development to address urban challenges

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

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

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Systems change for water and sanitation in informal settlements: The Mukuru Special Planning Area

Christopher Jordan — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:39:21 +0000

By Patrick Njoroge and Evans Otibine

The Mukuru Special Planning Area in Nairobi is home to a population of about 400,000. Approximately 100,560 households occupy 689 acres of land. The informal settlement is situated between the Nairobi Industrial Area and Mombasa Road, comprising of Mukuru Kwa Njenga, Mukuru Kwa Reuben and Viwandani.

The three settlements primarily consist of temporary structures made of corrugated iron, with many families residing in 9m² single-room dwellings. Most of these units are arranged within plots that contain ten rooms organised around a small internal courtyard. Approximately 94% of the residents in these three informal settlements are tenants who pay rent to the owners of the structures, who do not own the land on which they have built.

Water and sanitation challenges

Informal suppliers dominate water and sanitation services in this settlement. Water is distributed by vendors through kiosks or delivered door-to-door using handcarts. The informal, illegal and often chaotic system of piping – commonly referred to as “spaghetti connections” – is characterised by makeshift infrastructure typically laid above ground, making it highly susceptible to damage. Contaminated black water from overflowing pit latrines and drains frequently seeps into these fragile pipes, resulting in polluted water being used for cooking and drinking in households. Spaghetti connections are established by informal providers, who tap into the municipal supply and channel water to neighbourhood taps, where residents are charged exorbitant prices for 20-litre containers. Despite the poor quality and unreliable access, residents face a “poverty penalty”, paying 400-800% more per cubic metre for unsafe water than the official county rates.

Sanitation is mostly characterised by pit latrines that fill up quickly and are manually emptied, with the raw faecal waste dumped into the Ngong River. Residents are charged high fees for accessing the few pay-per-use toilets that exist, while water, which is unreliable and of low quality, costs about ten times the formal rate. The need to establish sustainable service delivery mechanisms to improve water and sanitation is therefore evident.

The Mukuru Special Planning Area

To enable the establishment of sustainable service delivery mechanisms, in 2017, the Nairobi City County Government declared Mukuru Kwa Njenga, Kwa Reuben and Viwandani to be a Special Planning Area. This designation initiated the development and implementation of a Mukuru Integrated Development Plan (MIDP).

Community asks:

Following designation of Mukuru as an SPA, water and sanitation plans were developed after extensive consultation with the residents, and three requests were made:

That water and waterborne sanitation services from Nairobi City water utility company are provided to the residents.
That families have access to toilets at the plot level, rather than relying on community toilets.
That prepaid water dispensers (PPDs) are provided, each one to serve 150 households.

Implementation of Mukuru Integrated Plan:

During the preliminary design phase of Mukuru’s water supply and sanitation systems, the technical team evaluated various options for sanitation and water supply. After extensive analysis, simplified sewer systems (SSS) and PPDs were selected as the best solutions. Simplified sewers enable the construction of a sewerage network using smaller-diameter pipes laid at a shallower depth and on a flatter gradient than conventional sewers. This enables more flexible designs, leading to minimal displacement compared to conventional systems. Specifically, simplified sewers also have the following advantages:

Lower capital and operational costs compared to conventional sewers.
Can be extended as the community grows.
Grey water, such as water used for washing clothes, can be managed concurrently.
Do not require onsite primary treatment units.

Simplified sewer systems were implemented in Mukuru Kwa Ruben, supported by the national government’s installation of trunk and main sewers. However, the government did not construct lateral sewers, which are necessary for last-mile connections. As a result, civil society organisations (CSOs) stepped in to invest in the construction of these lateral sewers, enabling residents to build plot-level toilets and connect to the sewer network.

To ease water provision, pre-paid water dispensers were adopted, allowing consumers to purchase water using prepaid tokens, thus eliminating the need for billing. Tokens are registered using a person’s national identification card at Nairobi Water offices. Currently, water is charged at one shilling per 20-litre jerrycan, compared to the previous rate of KES 5–20.

To address financial barriers, Akiba Mashinani Trust (AMT), in partnership with FSD-Kenya, established a sanitation revolving fund to support structure owners who lacked the means to construct toilets and pay Nairobi Water connection fees. So far, the fund has helped 127 structure owners build toilets and cover water connection costs, with an average loan per owner of approximately KES 20,000. Additionally, AMT and other CSOs, such as Water Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), have constructed approximately 3km of lateral sewers, connecting 1,248 plots and benefiting around 12,500 families.

Despite this progress, approximately 80% of residents still do not have plot-level toilets connected to the sewer system. Therefore, significant support is required for the construction of roughly 30km of lateral sewers and the installation of about 500 PPDs in Mukuru.

Partnership between AMT and the African Cities Research Consortium

AMT has partnered with ACRC to document the methodologies, systems and practices employed in expanding water and sanitation services in Mukuru Kwa Reuben through the Special Planning Area, while comprehensively assessing the outcomes of these interventions.

The partnership also seeks to identify and address critical financing gaps, infrastructure deficiencies, community organisation challenges, technical limitations and policy barriers that hinder the effectiveness of ongoing efforts. In parallel, the project will operationalise collaborative frameworks between AMT, Nairobi City County Government (NCCG), Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC), WSUP, the Nairobi Rivers Commission and other stakeholders, with a focus on strengthening and expanding these partnerships.

A key component of the initiative includes extending water and sanitation infrastructure to reach 8,000 households in Mukuru Viwandani. To ensure sustainability, the project will establish robust systems and governance structures to facilitate effective oversight and coordinated management of services, in collaboration with state actors.

Ultimately, the insights gained will contribute to enhancing the existing policy framework for delivering water and sanitation services in informal settlements, through refined methodological approaches.

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How is ACRC designed to drive urban reform?

Hannah — Thu, 15 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

This is the third in a series of blog posts focusing on how urban reform happens and where ACRC fits into change processes. The first blog post focuses on how ACRC’s approach links to issue-based programming, the second explores urban transformation and the centrality of trust in politically engaged development programmes, this third one takes a closer look at how ACRC adds value to urban reform, the fourth highlights how ACRC is helping build community capabilities to address urban challenges, and the fifth outlines what donors can learn from ACRC’s approach to development.

By Diana Mitlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally…

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

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

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

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

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

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Urban transformation and the trust triad

Hannah — Thu, 08 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

This is the second in a series of blog posts focusing on how urban reform happens and where ACRC fits into change processes. The first blog post focuses on how ACRC’s approach links to issue-based programming, this second one explores urban transformation and the centrality of trust in politically engaged development programmes, the third takes a closer look at how ACRC adds value to urban reform, the fourth highlights how ACRC is helping build community capabilities to address urban challenges, and the fifth outlines what donors can learn from ACRC’s approach to development.

By Diana Mitlin

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

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

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

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

What is the trust triad?

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

1. Trust in the people and processes to deliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Issue-based programming and the parallel tracks of urban reform

Hannah — Thu, 01 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on how urban reform happens and where ACRC fits into change processes. This first blog post focuses on how ACRC’s approach links to issue-based programming, the second explores urban transformation and the centrality of trust in politically engaged development programmes, the third takes a closer look at how ACRC adds value to urban reform, the fourth highlights how ACRC is helping build community capabilities to address urban challenges, and the fifth outlines what donors can learn from ACRC’s approach to development.

By Diana Mitlin

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

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

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

Dealing with issues

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: The building blocks of issue-based programming

Source: Gareth Williams (2025), Nine lessons from issue-based programming.

ACRC’s approach

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

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

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

The role of aid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACRC’s parallel tracks and issue-based programming

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

Figure 2: The parallel tracks of urban reform

Source: ACRC

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

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

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

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

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Tell us your thoughts about the ACRC urban reform database

Hannah — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

By Kate Lines

Public spaces that mitigate flooding in Nairobi. Developing policies to support internally displaced people in Mogadishu. Community-led climate resilience planning in Lagos. Embracing urban informality in Zimbabwean policy dialogue. Empowering and including youth in community safeguarding in Maiduguri. Accepting heterogeneity in sanitation infrastructure in Kampala. And strengthening the social contract by linking revenue generation to improved service provision in Freetown.

These are just some of the success stories from African cities that we’ve covered as case studies since we launched the ACRC urban reform database a year ago.

> Read more about the database’s aims and our approach to understanding and documenting positive and transformative urban progress in this earlier blog.

The database is a learning tool. The ambitions are:

First, to recognise the breadth of efforts to advance an urban reform frontier by sharing a wide set of related work. New case studies are continually being sourced, compiled and published – but many interesting urban reform initiatives are still undocumented.
And second, in doing so, to catalyse and contribute to broader debates about what is possible.
Then, third, to bolster our evidence base about the key themes underpinning positive and meaningful urban transformation, building on ACRC’s conceptual framework.

Share your views

We want to grow and develop the urban reform database further – and that’s where we need you!

Please share your experiences of using the database – and any suggestions for improvement or ideas for case studies – via this short survey:

Take the survey

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Podcast: Politics and progress in Accra with Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai

Hannah — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 07:30:00 +0000

Accra is home to around 5 million people and plays a crucial role in Ghana’s national political landscape. Located on the coast of West Africa, development trajectories of the city are significantly influenced by national and global events.

More than two thirds of the population are estimated to reside in informal settlements, with a great diversity of cultures and ethnicities across communities. Many of these areas have no or unreliable access to essential services including water, electricity and sanitation, and significant levels of inequality exist among different neighbourhoods.

In this episode, Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai joins Chris Jordan to talk about the major findings from ACRC’s urban development research in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area. He discusses how the city has changed over the last 25 years, including shifting geographical boundaries, along with the slow progress being made towards addressing Accra’s significant housing deficit and improving service delivery in disadvantaged areas.

He notes how attitudes towards informal settlement residents and their needs are slowly changing, with some evidence to suggest that national and city elites are making efforts to enhance basic services in settlements like Old Fadama. Delving into insights from the city research into the political dynamics at play in Accra, he also highlights the importance of the city to national elites – largely due to its significant urban population and position as a swing voting city – and the need for greater cooperation and capacity building among city authorities to drive meaningful urban transformation.

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai is an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Ghana Business School, an honorary research fellow at the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester and ACRC’s Accra city lead.

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

Transcript

The full podcast transcript is available below.

Read now

Chris Jordan [00:00:08] Welcome to this edition of the African Cities podcast. My name is Chris Jordan. I’m the Communications Manager for ACRC based at the University of Manchester. And today I’m delighted to welcome Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai to talk to us about some of the research that he’s been doing on Accra. So Abdul-Gafaru is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Ghana Business School. He’s also well known to us at the Global Development Institute. Abdul-Gafaru did his PhD here. He’s an honorary research fellow and also did lots of work around the Effective States and Inclusive Development research project, looking at the political settlements of Accra and of Ghana. He’s also been the city lead for the foundation phase of work in Accra. So Abdul-Gafaru, welcome to the podcast.

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:00:59] Thanks very much, Chris, thanks for having me.

Chris Jordan [00:01:02] So, you are obviously somebody who works at the University of Ghana, which is located slap bang in the middle of the city. Can you tell me how long have you lived in Accra for?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:01:13] So I think it’s been on and off. I first went to Accra actually for the first time, leaving or travelling outside my hometown, in the year 2000 to start my undergraduate programme at the University of Ghana. But I say it’s been on and off because shortly after finishing my undergraduate programme, I travelled to the UK for my master’s degree in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. But then I went back to Ghana again and worked with an NGO in Accra on governance issues, on issues of local governance, decentralisation, strengthening citizens’ capacity in engaging with duty bearers. But after about three years, I just saw myself as an academic and I chose to explore more to get back to school. And, fortunately, I had an opportunity to get back, this time around in Manchester, where I studied for my PhD in development policy and management. So it was after completion and after a one-year postdoc with Manchester that I went back to Accra to start my present position as lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, I think, in early 2014. Yeah. So since then I’ve been more or less based in Accra.

Chris Jordan [00:02:49] So it must have been interesting coming and going from Accra, you must have noticed a lot of changes over the last 25 years since the year 2000. How has that looked from your perspective?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:03:02] Yeah, I think there is no doubt that Accra is changing, the population of the city is growing. You can point to some evidence of improvements in some dimensions, but of course the improvements appear extremely slow, in some cases very hard to notice. If you look at the most recent population and housing census in Ghana, it shows clearly that the population of the city has grown very rapidly. One of the observations in the report is that Accra’s housing deficit has reduced. But of course it remains substantial – I think at about 1.8 million. So when I say it’s very hard to notice, I mean, if you still have a housing deficit of close to 2 million, you can imagine the problem that ordinary people still struggle with or go through to be able to meet their basic housing needs. There are many significant challenges in so many dimensions. Beyond the issue of the housing deficit, and partly as a result of this deficit, you have a significant number of informal settlements and conditions of life in these settlements are very deplorable. So there is very clear evidence that, yes, some progress has been made, but is so, so, so, so, so slow. The city still struggles with problems of having gas or sanitation. There is no reliable access to electricity. There is no reliable access to water. There are significant levels of inequality among different neighbourhoods. So even with regards to the issue of housing, the housing sector presents us with somewhat of a paradox. In some dimensions, where you come to high-income neighbourhood and high-rise buildings and so forth, there is actually an oversupply of housing – a lot of homes that are not being bought. But when it comes to issues of housing for people working in the informal economy, for the urban poor in general, that’s where you see these significant levels of deficits, and as a result, having these problems with regards to the proliferation of informal settlements, for example. It is not as if government is not doing anything about these problems. It’s just that the level of progress is so slow and sometimes probably also as a result of defaults in the manner in which policies are designed. We have problem not seeing the kind of progress that we all desire to see. So I’ll give you one example in regards to this issue of housing. One of the very recent initiatives that government has put in place to address challenges associated with housing had been to establish a new entity that would help address problems associated with rental accommodation. So, by law, according to the Rent Act of Ghana, you are not required, as someone who is actively seeking to rent a home, you are not required to pay beyond six months of rent, and your rent is supposed to be paid on a monthly basis after the initial lump sum payment of around six months. But that is the formal rule. The practice is that landlords require to seek rental accommodation to make advance payments of a minimum of between two to three years – in fact, in some cases, five years. I recall my own situation when I was leaving Manchester to relocate back in Accra, I had to pay an initial rent for a two-year period. Where do you expect the urban poor to be able to accumulate this kind of money, to be able to pay a two-year advance? So government recently put in place some kind of new arrangements to provide some loans to those seeking rental accommodation, which of course, on the one hand you would laud as a good initiative, but on the other, this is an initiative that is specifically designed to benefit those with regular income. So, and as part of the qualification, you need to show evidence of regular income. And we know in general, those working in the informal economy have incomes that are often very irregular. So the probability of this initiative not sufficiently benefiting probably those who need it most is very high. So these are some of the things that I have in mind when I say, well, yes, there is progress, but generally the progress is slow, sometimes partly as a result of flaws in policy designs, but in most cases as a result of weak implementation.

Chris Jordan [00:08:36] Yeah. And I guess like many African cities, I think in Accra population has doubled over the last ten years. So I guess even with fantastic service provision and great coordination, that would be a huge challenge for any metropolitan area, let alone one that that is experiencing such inequality and has so many low-income communities based around it. I’m just wondering, for people who haven’t been to Accra, could you describe it? Obviously it’s on the coast, so presumably that plays a big role in how it feels and its character?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:09:16] Yeah, that’s a very loaded question. And I say so because the question of “what is Accra?” honestly doesn’t have a one universally acceptable meaning or definition. People use the word Accra, the name Accra, in reference to very different things. So there are people who would refer to Accra in the form of the Greater Accra Region. Ghana has 16 administrative regions and the Greater Accra is the national capital. So in many cases, you would hear people saying that “I’m going to Accra”. They mean the Greater Accra Region. Especially people outside of the Greater Accra Region, when they say they are going to Accra, they mean they are going to the Greater Accra Region. But let’s assume you happen to travel from Manchester to Accra. You’ve landed in Accra. It will not be strange for you to see someone picking a car and telling you that he or she is going to Accra. Right? So you’d be wondering, “but we are in Accra, I’m in Accra, what do you mean by you are going to Accra?” And it’s just because of changes in geographical boundaries over time. So there are people who refer to Accra in terms of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, which is actually the heart, the centre, more or less, of Accra, or some would call it original Accra. And people will refer to that original Accra, because boundaries have changed substantially over time. So the Accra Metropolitan Assembly – so, for example, if you look back prior to say 2000, 2004, the geographical boundary of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly has shrunk substantially because the city has been subjected to a form of fragmentation, the creation of so many local government units. So whereas the AMA, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, would have probably at some point in time covering maybe several hundreds of square kilometres and so on and so forth, the jurisdiction of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly has shrunk substantially. Now, another way that people refer to Accra, which is actually how we approached Accra in our study, was to look at it not in terms of the Greater Accra Region, nor the Accra, the small Accra Metropolitan Assembly, but what has increasingly become known as the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area. And the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area comprises – people again, typically define it differently, some would actually refer to it as the city region, some would actually define it to include local government units that are even outside of the boundaries of the Greater Accra Region, for example, to include districts like Awutu Senya in the central region, for example – but within our research, we defined the Greater Accra Metropolitan Assembly to refer to the 25 urban municipal metropolitan councils within the Greater Accra Region. So at the moment, the Greater Accra as a region is made up of 29 local government units, but we focus our study on the 25. Of course, we do an urban kind of study, so we didn’t think it was worth including the rural district that are still within there. So we define Accra as the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, which more or less refers to the 25 urban sort of councils – we don’t call them councils in Accra. They are popularly referred to as district or metropolitan, if you like, municipal assemblies within the Greater Accra Region. And I’m sure of course everyone knows that the city is located on the coast of West Africa. There’s a lot of diversity within the city, both in terms of, I would say, culture, because there are still some communities that are dominated by the indigenous, ethnic group within the city. But significant parts of the city have become highly cosmopolitan, dominated by migrants, who are not indigenous to the city. So you would see some kinds of variations, depending on a wide range of factors, depending on whether you are living in a poor or affluent neighbourhood, depending on whether you are living in an indigen-dominated community, so you would see substantial variations. So it’s very hard to define or explain what Accra really is from a very homogeneous point of view.

Chris Jordan [00:14:33] And Accra itself is also right in the middle of the West African Corridor. There’s been a lot of focus on that part of the world. There’s this new highway between Abidjan and Lagos that’s due to be constructed. Is that something that you feel when you’re living and working in Accra? Do you feel part of this, a kind of broader West African urban sprawl, almost, or, does it still feel more national in focus?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:15:03] I think it would probably depend on which part of the city you are. But largely, in most parts of the city, you wouldn’t have that strong West African feel – depending of course, on where you are. So, for example, first and foremost, it’s important to note that Accra is regarded as a second-tier global city, meaning that the development trajectories of the city, the experiences of the city, are actually shaped not just by what is happening domestically, but actually also globally. And a lot of the things that go on in this city are actually influenced by the influx of people from not just within West Africa, but actually across the globe – there are so many business opportunities that you find, a lot of multinational companies, especially following the discovery of oil in in 2007, which of course has had significant impact on the value of land, for example, in the city. So a lot of things that actually shape the city’s development trajectories are actually external, global, international in nature. But in everyday politics and everyday lifestyles or living, and in most parts of the city, you wouldn’t necessarily have a feel of this. But I made a point that it depends on where you are in the city, because I visited one informal settlement. And you would notice that there’s a certain business in the city, we’re speaking informal sector wastepickers. This is a sector that actually appeared dominated, or at least a sector that has a very strong influx or dominance or presence of people from other West African countries – and Niger, to some extent, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Mali and so forth. So if you live within, if you work, if you operate within that sector, and if you live within that part of the informal settlement, you would have a much stronger feeling that Accra is not just for Ghanaians. You would see that West African appeal, more or less. So by and large, I would say that it depends so much on which part of the city that you are actually living in.

Chris Jordan [00:17:52] Fascinating. And I know you’ve led a lot of the work around looking at the politics of Accra and how that intersected with national politics. Obviously, Accra is the capital of Ghana – how did that shake out? You’ve already mentioned the fragmentation at the local level, how does it work between national and city politics?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:18:14] Yeah, I think this would take much longer time to address than we probably have. I think the first thing to bear in mind is the importance of city to national elites. Accra, and especially when you approach it from the perspective of the GAMA – the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area – or the Greater Accra Region is the most populous urban agglomeration in Ghana. That’s number one. Number two, it is a typical swing voting city. It is a city that you have fewer loyal voters to any of the two dominant political parties. What it means is that it’s an important electoral battleground for Ghana’s two dominant political parties. So obviously, this is not a city that any national elite would want to have less control over. You would want to have control. You would want to be in charge. You’d want to do things in a way that you can have a significant grip over how the city is governed. You would have a significant interest in determining how resources get distributed, in ways that would enhance your own chances of winning elections. And as the most populous, most swing voting seat in Ghana, what it also means is that to win presidential elections, it is not an exaggeration to say that you ought to win Accra. Of the several elections – is it eight or nine elections or so that have been held since 1992? – it has only happened on one single occasion that the party that won the national election lost narrowly in Accra. In other words, almost every political party that has won the presidency won or had to be in Accra. So that tells you how important the city is to national elections. And this has had a lot of implications on the manner in which the city is governed. First and foremost, there have been a lot of conversations about the need to allow ordinary citizens to choose who their city mayors should be. For decades, national elites have been dragging their feet over this idea of allowing ordinary citizens to vote their seat. So democratic as Ghana is often seen to be, Ghana doesn’t practise what you would call democratic decentralisation or devolution, in the sense that, till date, the question of who becomes the mayor of Accra is more or less the exclusive preserve of the president. So mayors have remained presidential appointees. And who qualifies to be appointed or who is likely to be appointed as the mayor of Accra is not the most competent, is not the most knowledgeable, is not the most experienced in urban governance, but is the one who is more politically loyal to the president. It is more about your records in building the local party machinery over time. It is more about your records in supporting – I mean, how visible are you to local party activists is the most significant factor that determines whether you become a mayor. And what that means again, is that no matter how brilliant you are as a mayor, if the president who appoints you loses presidential elections, you automatically also lose your mayoral position. Because the incoming president is also keen on appointing a new set of mayors who would be more politically loyal to him or her. So you see a lot of things actually happening at the city level, and you struggle to actually separate the interest of city authorities from the interest of ruling national political elites, because as a mayor, I’m aware that how long I stay in power depends on how long you, as my appointed president, stay in power. So there is that sort of collusion, more or less, between national city authorities, because they tend to have a common interest in making sure that the ruling party stays in power. And that has a lot of implications, for example, in terms of how distributive politics plays out, who benefits more from distributive politics or the distribution of public goods, to some extent, is also dependent on the question of which of the political parties is in power. So different neighbourhoods would be subjected to different kinds of politics, depending on which of the parties in power is the dominant, which of the two dominant political parties is in power at the national level. So you see rather strong, clear linkages between what happens at the national level and what happens at the city level. Of course, occasionally there have been some slight differences, because there have been several moments when the city authorities would try, for example, to decongest the city, clear the central business district of hawkers, and so on and so forth. But central government will intervene. They say, “look, you are taking initiatives that are undermining my chances of securing power”. So there were moments when you see some visionary mayors try to do something that is not entirely in the interest of national elites. And you will see direct intervention, sometimes reportedly from the president himself, giving orders to put a halt or stop to some of these things that city authorities sometimes try to do. So by and large, city politics is significantly determined by politics at the national level.

Chris Jordan [00:24:50] And I know as you’ve been doing this research and all the other researchers who were working on it in Accra have been engaging, or trying to engage quite regularly, quite strongly with city authorities, with national authorities. Could you summarise what sort of response, what sort of attitude you’ve been picking up as you’ve been doing the research? Is there interest in the kind of work, in the kind of issues that we’ve been looking at?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:25:17] Yeah, we’ve done a lot of engagement and all the domain researchers did engage with national and city-level authorities. What I picked up in the conversations that I had with a lot of city authorities, one thing that struck me a lot, which is part of the reason why we thought it was important to define Accra in a relatively broader sense, in terms of the GAMA as opposed to a very narrow sense of defining it as the Accra Metropolitan Assembly – it’s the fact that, then again, this has to do with the extent to which what happens at the city level is so subjected to national- level elites’ political interest. One of the challenges that came up in many of the conversations that I had with city authorities is the manner in which the several local government units tend to operate autonomously in silos, with very little co-creation and collaboration. So I made a point that the government is made up of 25 urban councils. Each of these has its own mayor operating independently. And each of these councils operates as an independent planning unit. But here is the case. You have problems that cut across. So you have a problem that to address it, you will probably need all the 25 local councils to come together. But the incentives to come together are weak or probably non-existent. In fact, there remain some district boundary disputes among them. There have been occasions when you see them competing for revenue. So, for example, between Council A and Council B, who is more qualified to take the revenue from this particular jurisdiction? So you have a situation where power tends to be so dispersed among so many potential, and not even potential, but actual veto players. So cooperation is somewhat limited. There is a greater metropolitan assembly that is set up, like the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council. It’s supposed to make sure that these assemblies work in cooperation, in collaboration with each other. But its role is merely one of coordination. It is underresourced. It doesn’t have the power to enforce decisions, for example, on these independent units. So you have a situation where bureaucrats within the assembly – I mean, there is the interest to get things going, but at the end of the day, politics comes in the way, in the sense that literally every decision, even by city authorities, is viewed with a political lens. So it is not all the time, or even in most cases, that decisions or governance decisions are taken on the basis of technocratic expertise. There are technocrats within the assemblies. We have district coordinating directors, for example. We have planning officers and so on and so forth. The unfortunate thing is that final decisions, lie in the hands of the politically appointed mayor, whose main preoccupation is to make sure that the governing party stays in power. So, you see in many cases, tension between what is technocratically sound, on the one hand, and between what is politically sensible or desirable, on the other. And in these tensions, it is the politics that actually wins. So there are some other forms of challenges with regards to issues of staffing and technocratic expertise. But what I see as probably a much bigger issue is not just about limited staffing or limited knowledge on the part of technocrats or bureaucrats. But what I see as the biggest issue is the question of whether bureaucrats have sufficient operational autonomy to be able to do things and drive development processes on the basis of the kind of technocratic expertise that they have. So you see politics infiltrating at almost every stage in life.

Chris Jordan [00:30:34] Yeah. No surprise there then. And, you mentioned briefly of raising revenues. And I think in pretty much every single city that ACRC has looked at, we found that city authorities are just working without even nearly the amount of financing that they need to really make a transformative change, or even just to keep up with population growth. Is that the case in Accra?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:30:58] Its absolutely the case in Accra. So, on the one hand, city authorities lack the capacity to mobilise sufficient revenues for development and are therefore heavily dependent on central government transfers. But again, partly because of the desire to control what happens at the city or subnational level, fiscal decentralisation in Ghana is very weak. So a lot of city authorities depend quite substantially on what is referred to as the District Assembly Common Fund, which is a statutory fund that government allocates to all municipal metropolitan councils across the country, beyond Accra and so on. There are several problems with this. One of the problems is that it’s inadequate, it’s irregular, and city authorities have no autonomy over it. In many cases, central government directives will dictate as to how not less than 70% of that transfer should be used. In other words, central government transfers the resources to city authorities, but dictates to them to use it for implementing certain national- level priorities. So the issue of autonomy there is lacking. But what is particularly striking, probably more striking, is that city authorities don’t have the capacity to borrow substantial sums of money for development purposes. I read a story around South Africa, how municipal authorities are able to go to the markets, borrow substantial resources to do infrastructure development and so on and so forth. City authorities in Ghana don’t have that autonomy. You do have the capacity to borrow without central government approval, but you’ll be shocked to hear that, by law, to date, city authorities cannot borrow the equivalent of something around 500 USD without the approval of the Finance Ministry, without the approval of central government authority. So, literally, you are not an autonomous local government entity. So you don’t have the capacity to borrow, you don’t have the capacity to mobilise enough revenues and the transfer that you gain from central government, you have no autonomy over it. So the problem about decentralisation in Ghana is not just about the lack of devolution of political decentralisation, but fiscal decentralisation also tends to be significantly weak. There have been efforts as far back as the 2000s to change the laws to allow or to enhance the borrowing capacities of municipal authorities and so on. But to date it’s not been put into practice, it’s not been passed, and it remains on paper and they’re compelling city authorities to remain heavily reliant on central government transfers that are insufficient, that are irregular, and that are actually unreliable. In many cases, it takes forever for these authorities to receive the funds.

Chris Jordan [00:34:42] Yeah. It’s a slightly grim picture. I wanted to ask you about informal settlements, and obviously there are some extremely large informal settlements across Accra, Old Fadama being possibly the most well-known. What did you pick up as the attitudes of politicians and local authorities towards informal settlements? And are they sympathetic to upgrading settlements as they are, or is the agenda different?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:35:16] Okay, so you are asking about what is the attitude of political elites towards informal settlements? I think my main observation is that the attitude is changing for a significant part. For example, I would say from the 2000s all the way to I would say the 2010s, you would have been absolutely right to characterise the relationship between political elites and informal settlements as one of neglect, one of sheer neglect and one of harassment. I did hear you mention Old Fadama. I’m sure you probably would have heard of the uncountable number of times that residents of Old Fadama have been subjected to eviction efforts, forced eviction attempts. So for a very long period of time, the residents were subjected to neglect, no access to basic services. And city authority’s position about Old Fadama had a particular hand in that – this is an illegal settlement so how do you extend services to people resided in a place illegally? And the argument had been that extending basic services like water, like electricity, working on their roads and so forth is more or less an indirect way of legalising their illegalities. So you’d better not recognise them. And one of the interviewees, I remember one respondent telling me that if you look at the map of Accra in the eyes of city authorities, Old Fadama doesn’t exist. They don’t appear in the map because this is an illegal settlement. So that is the neglect aspect. And the harassment is essentially the issue of forced evictions. But of course there is clear evidence that things are changing. I made a point about the importance of Accra to national elites and that to win elections in Ghana, you actually ought to win in the Greater Accra Region, partly because of its populated nature, but also largely because it seems majority or a significant proportion of voters are swing voters. They are contingently loyal to parties, in the sense that whether they vote for you or not depends on how they assess your policies, your attitude towards them. And informal settlements, just as the population of the city has grown over time, so has the population of residents of informal settlements. I think presently its estimated that Old Fadama has over 200,000 residents. And let’s put this in a broader perspective. In 2008, the party that won the presidential elections won by a margin of around 40,000 votes nationally. So imagine what the population of Old Fadama can do. Again, just beyond the issue of votes, many of these settlements are the places where parties go to recruit youthful energetic people to protect their ballots. And therefore places like Old Fadama and other informal settlements are the sources where party footsoldiers are recruited. So again, meaning that their importance is not just about votes, but also the protection of the votes that national elites so much like, desire. So probably partly as a result of this and the fact that various international and local agencies like People’s Dialogue, like Slum Dwellers International, they work rather collaboratively with residents to help propel against these eviction attempts. My sense, and actually the sense of some residents at the moment, is that national elites are no more considering the possibility of evicting residents. To the extent that the current vice president has actually made some efforts to enhance access to some basic services within the settlement. They have streetlights now. I do understand their roads are being worked on. There was an attempt to construct a hostel facility for female migrants within the settlements. So this is what I mean by saying that there is some evidence of change – of course, again at a very slow pace, because the magnitude of the problem in these settlements is so significant that the kind of changes that would be needed to bring about the transformation that everyone would desire is not the kind of changes that we are seeing. We are seeing progress at a very snail’s slow pace. But of course things are changing.

Chris Jordan [00:40:52] Well, I think it’s always nice to leave things on a somewhat positive note, even if there are big challenges ahead. So thank you so much, Abdul-Gafaru, for sharing all those insights and giving us a glimpse into the world and then the politics of Accra. Look forward to reading the full city synthesis paper that you’re busy finalising. And thank you very much for joining us today.

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:41:16] Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me.

Outro [00:41:21] You have been listening to the African Cities podcast. Remember to subscribe for more urban development insights and interviews from the African Cities Research Consortium.

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Uncovering the politics of informal settlements in African cities

Hannah — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Panellists:

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

Chair:

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

Watch the full webinar recording below.

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urban reform - ACRC

Navigating different approaches to urban reform in Harare

Six pathways to urban reform

Forum for constructive engagement – from policy to implementation

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What can FCDO and other donors learn from ACRC’s approach to development?

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

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

2. Wicked problems often require a reform coalition

3. Local leadership – and funding – is key

A role for “outsiders”?

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How does action research build community and state capabilities?

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

1. Working out the change that is needed

2. Broader engagement with the proposed solution

3. Gaining support from professionals

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

5. Embedding the process within other communities

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

The importance of capability development to address urban challenges

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Systems change for water and sanitation in informal settlements: The Mukuru Special Planning Area

Water and sanitation challenges

The Mukuru Special Planning Area

Partnership between AMT and the African Cities Research Consortium

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How is ACRC designed to drive urban reform?

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

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

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

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

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

Finally…

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Urban transformation and the trust triad

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

What is the trust triad?

1. Trust in the people and processes to deliver

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

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

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Issue-based programming and the parallel tracks of urban reform

Urban transformations: Aid, trust and ACRC

Dealing with issues

Figure 1: The building blocks of issue-based programming

ACRC’s approach

The role of aid

ACRC’s parallel tracks and issue-based programming

Figure 2: The parallel tracks of urban reform

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Tell us your thoughts about the ACRC urban reform database

Share your views

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Podcast: Politics and progress in Accra with Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai

Transcript

Read now

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Uncovering the politics of informal settlements in African cities

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