The model computes the suitability of a given land parcel for each income group by taking into consideration the characteristics of the parcel – including land values, proximity to infrastructure and amenities, slope/elevation and land use zoning. The model accounts for how different income groups prioritise different location choice factors. The attractiveness of land parcels is dynamically updated during the prediction period based on the income profiles of neighbouring parcels.

To evaluate TI-City, the model was applied in Accra and its performance was compared with that of SLEUTH. First, both models were used to predict the urban expansion of Accra from 2000 to 2010. The predictions from each model were visually and quantitatively compared with the observed (real) expansion of Accra. As can be seen in Figure 2, both models perform well in predicting inner-city developments. However, TI-City outperforms SLEUTH in predicting suburban developments. Quantitatively, TI-City explains up to 65% of the variations in urban expansion patterns of Accra, whiles SLEUTH only accounts for 27%.

Impact: How TI-City informed the Accra structure plan

TI-City has been applied in the real world. Urban planners leading the preparation of a 15-year structure plan for the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) have used TI-City to predict the urban footprint of the city in 2035. They have used the prediction from the model as a business-as-usual scenario to assess what will happen if there is no significant change in the development and implementation of land use regulations in the city.

For instance, using TI-City’s output, the planners have quantified there will be 18% loss of forest land, 12% loss of croplands thereby creating urban food insecurities, 4% loss of water cover and 18% loss of shrubs if the city continues to expand as usual. Following these predictions, the urban planners have developed alternative development scenarios, one of which is the “guided trend”.

In the guided trend scenario, the planners recognise the predictions from TI-City as the most likely outcome. As this will be extremely difficult to change in the next 15 years, they attempt instead to guide the expected expansion into suburban centres, thereby minimising the negative impacts of the city’s expansion. One of the attempts by the planners to guide the city’s expansion is to locate and develop new centres in the suburban areas where the model predicts most of the expansion will occur as shown in Figure 4.

Applying TI-City to other African cities

The case of Accra demonstrates the potential impacts of using TI-City to predict urban expansion in other African cities. Currently, a three-year ESRC-funded project led by Felix Agyemang is looking into scaling up and applying the model to other African cities.

Conversations are underway with a number of cities that are members of the Africa-Europe Mayors’ Dialogue to gauge interest in applying this model. This is a live conversation and we would welcome hearing from other cities in Africa that would be interested in exploring this modelling technique.

Header photo credit: sercansamanci / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). Aerial view over Accra, Ghana.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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

By Tom Goodfellow

At a time when funding for urban infrastructure and the promotion of an overarching global goal – the hard-won SDG 11 – have catapulted cities up the international policy agenda, it’s hard to believe that urban issues could ever have been considered marginal.

In relation to much of Africa, however, until about 15 years ago urban development challenges were quite a fringe concern in both policy and academic research. Many governments on the continent – particularly in eastern Africa, where a suite of countries were governed by regimes whose rebel origins lay deep in the rural peripheries – viewed city dwellers either with indifference or active hostility. International donor agencies ploughed funds into rural development, and later into aspatial “social” sectors such as education and health. Meanwhile, the renewed interest from China in Africa in the early 2000s was largely seen as being focused on natural resource extraction.

This all changed from around 2010. The intense refocusing of international attention on African cities has sometimes been taken for granted as a natural consequence of the continent’s urbanisation, and of evolving international aid and investment priorities. Yet the focus on external and demographic drivers can obscure how this reorientation has been shaped in strikingly diverse ways by different political contexts.

Against the background of this “urban turn” in 21st century Africa, my book Politics and the Urban Frontier explores how domestic politics and power struggles harness the demographic force of urban growth, alongside diversifying flows of international finance, to produce very different kinds of cities.

I explore this in a set of countries in East Africa (specifically, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda), which I argue is the global urban frontier: the region with the lowest proportion of people living in urban areas, but also on average the fastest rates of urbanisation. Globally sanctioned ideals of urban progress have been central to urban development in this region, yet their fate in any given city is partly determined by how they become entangled with other political and economic agendas.

What’s missing in “global” urban policy debates?

The kinds of blueprints that have often been promoted for cities in low-income countries (think of the vogue for “self-help” housing schemes in the 1970s, the prescriptive urban “good governance” reforms dominating the 1990s, or the supposed panacea of land titling since the early 2000s) are rooted in certain generic assumptions about how cities work.

These policy approaches are steeped in ideas of private property, infrastructure planning and capitalist social relations that are largely rooted in industrialised countries elsewhere. African cities are often seen by foreign donors and external investors as substandard versions of the urban norm: low-income, dysfunctional nearly-cities that can be “lifted” with the application of enough funds and the right regulatory frameworks.

Yet cities are not just bundles of land, regulations and economic resources. They are also fundamentally political arrangements of people and things, and in much of the world in the twenty-first century they are shaped by three intersecting variables, about which conventional urban debates say little.

First, cities are conditioned by shifting geopolitics, both in terms of regional dynamics of trade, movement and diplomacy, and in terms of the diversifying forms of international finance on offer from donors and creditors. These financial flows, which wax and wane in response to geopolitical conditions, provide scope for bargaining and dealmaking over big investments in and around capital cities, where national government priorities jostle with urban ones.

Second, cities are increasingly subject to dynamics of resurgent authoritarianism – but the nature and impact of this varies by country, given different levels of prior democratic institutional development and very different distributions of power among urban social groups. These differences affect how easily a governing regime can crush urban social opposition and repress city-level institutions.

Third, and related, cities are sites of intensifying quests for political legitimacy by governments seeking to build and hold urban power in the context of competing socioeconomic demands. In East Africa, postcolonial legitimacy to govern has often been sought among the rural majority. This is no longer adequate in the face of rapid urban growth. Urban legitimacy is now a central concern, even for authoritarian regimes – but precisely which urban groups matter most, and what needs to be done to court their support, will differ substantially by context.

Cities, then, are geopolitical hubs in which leaders and governing coalitions draw international flows into localised bargaining processes, in pursuit of (often authoritarian) urban power and legitimacy – not just globalising sites of “travelling” urban planning visions and ideals of entrepreneurialism. The latter aspects of cities – which are no doubt important – have received much greater attention than the former. Politics and the Urban Frontier is part of an attempted rebalancing.

Urban analysis as political work

Focusing on East Africa, the book develops a detailed analytical framework to explain differences in urban trajectories between three cities that face many similar socioeconomic and demographic pressures, and similar flows of ideas and finance. It aims to explain why we see a stark contrast between a sustained commitment to top-down master planning processes in Kigali, accompanied by drive towards high-end service sector-led development, in contrast with a long-term “anti-planning” political culture in Kampala where major urban infrastructures are fragmented and targeted as sources of private gain. Meanwhile, Addis Ababa has seen huge investments in the kinds of large-scale mass transport and housing projects that never get off the ground in the other two cities (though these have taken on a life of their own, due to widespread use by social groups for which they were not initially designed). These differences between the cities are above all rooted in power relations, rather than economic might or depoliticised notions of “state capacity”.

Why does all this matter? Aside from academic rebalancing, the book’s argument aims to enhance understanding about which kinds of urban investments will be taken seriously in a given context, and which may collide with political dynamics that mean they founder or twist into radically new directions during implementation. Having the analytical tools to better understand the political agendas and conflicts that underpin urban policy in a given context is essential if the international push towards more inclusive urban futures is to produce results in actual urban places.

But attention to the politics of urban development is not just about tailoring urban interventions to political contexts to enhance implementation. It’s also about recognising how such interventions can either bolster or reconfigure existing power relations, and therefore influence politics itself in a particular place – for better or worse.

There is a lot at stake in Africa’s urban century. We have seen the forms of radical socioeconomic polarisation, spatial segregation and authoritarianism that are possible in cities across the world. Indeed, many African cities were created this way during colonialism, and have struggled to escape this shadow. As the continent becomes an increasingly urban, it is vitally important that investors, donors, analysts and advisors, who often see themselves as providing technical assistance, realise they are doing fundamentally political work – and not always in the ways they intend.

This blog post is republished with permission from the OUPblog. Read the original article.

Header photo credit: Eric Isselee / Life on White (via Canva Pro). Aerial overview of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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

Makoko, a coastal informal settlement in Lagos. Photo credit: peeterv / iStock

Development initiatives are many, but they seem unworkable or unsustainable in the face of systemic state performance deficits. As resources become constrained, criminal networks could potentially fill the cracks left by overstretched and undercapitalised regimes. The risk of natural and manmade disasters – compounded by climate change, unregulated urbanisation and substandard infrastructure – will amplify challenges for humanitarian support. As inequality increases, traditionally conflicting religions, tribal groups and ethnicities will be brought into close proximity in these cosmopolitan cities. Low productivity will coexist with unprecedented population growth, as informal settlements rapidly expand alongside modern and highbrow settlements.

Within African cities, multiple stressors exist which challenge the cities’ ability to cope. To ignore large African cities at the global level, therefore, is perhaps to ignore the global future. The growing significance of cities in Africa will make their stability critical for global policy objectives. Failure to focus attention on them today will create strategic vulnerability for the world tomorrow. In a world made smaller by globalisation, pressures emanating from African megacities will have the capability to spread to and threaten western nations and interests.

Safety and security risks

African megacities are potential flashpoints from which an unanticipated strategic security surprise could emerge. They may offer several benefits to discrete criminal networks and safe shelter for terrorist groups who wish to strike even beyond the city. Cities’ traditional structures and value systems that once served as buffers and restricted criminal behaviour are severely undermined and reduced by large-scale migration. Crime actors have comparative freedom of operation as they integrate with the local population. Megacities could provide terrorists with the potential to cause mass fatalities in pursuit of gaining tangible political attention, or socioeconomic and/or military objectives.

Lagos, for example, is the most affected city in Nigeria in terms of the number of crime cases. The city has been rated with a score of 80.8 out of a possible crime score of 100 and in 2022 was ranked the second worst city to live in the world. In 2017, the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics reported that Lagos has the highest percentage share of total crime cases reported (37.9%) in Nigeria. Criminal youngsters and cultists in Lagos bear names like “One Million Boys”, “Fadeyi Boys”, “Awawa Boys”, “Para Gang Confraternity” (comprising mainly teenage girls). In different parts of the city, gang members rob people, break into homes and burgle shops. They also commit arson on properties and businesses, and murder. Some have elite patronage, as powerful actors use them as protectors and political ambition enforcers. Concealed in these groups is their capacity to transform into full criminal networks of terrorist groups. With improvements in the city’s healthcare and education systems, Lagos has now moved up two places to fourth worst city in the world ranking. But crime and insecurity remain problematic.

In addition, Lagos has been placed on high alert, following intelligence reports that Boko Haram terrorists and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have plans to attack the city and create a base in Lagos or nearby. Some spontaneous happenings suggest that this may not be a mere threat. Just few days after the alert, terrorists launched two attacks on Owo – a cosmopolitan town in the same southwest area as Lagos. On 5 June 2022, they targeted worshippers attending church, and conducted a second attack on 27 July 2022. Although dismissed as speculative, the federal government claims that attacks have been traced to the terrorist group ISWAP. Previously, no such large-scale attacks had occurred in the Lagos southwest area. Therefore, beyond the Lake Chad Basin at the intersection of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and northeastern Nigeria, it not unlikely that ISWAP and the like are gathering momentum around Africa’s most populous city.

Time for strategic change

The good news is that there is time to enact key policy changes to prepare for this complex environment. Security agencies must take responsibility for this urbanisation challenge. They need to build a community of interest, focusing on large cities, and formulate new strategic, operational and tactical approaches. All indications show that the security organisations are currently unprepared.

A decade of fighting Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorism in northern Nigeria should be a lesson that its security agency must shape itself to the complex African environment. Security agencies in Africa must immediately begin the process of understanding large cities and challenge themselves across their organisation, including training, leadership, personnel and modern facilities.

This blog calls for interventions including enhancing multistakeholder cooperation between state and the organised private sector, and reforming budgets to prioritise safety and security. Another key solution is to empower low-income neighbourhoods economically to reduce inequality and boost local community resilience by improving the city labour force. A bottom-up approach is required, to enable local communities to address security challenges, as opposed to top-down strategies. Community-led approaches can make good use of local knowledge and gather better community buy-in, thereby reducing implementation costs – which is vital in African economies, where resources are scarce and deficits remain extreme.

The present conditions of African cities call for some form of foreign aid and intervention, as the current risk poses a threat to global sustainability and global interests. Establishing an ongoing understanding of the dynamics of African cities is essential. Failure to understand these places will produce operational and tactical vulnerability. Thanks to ACRC and other institutions undertaking research projects, we have a critical opportunity to add greater depth to the understanding of the implications of African cities for the global future.

Header photo credit: peeterv / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). Busy streets of Lagos, Nigeria.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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

Guest blog by Astrid RN Haas, fellow at the University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute and extraordinary lecturer in the University of Pretoria’s Department of Economics

Economists have long claimed there is overwhelming evidence that urbanisation unlocks the potential for economic growth and, from this, development. They point to the fact that no country to date has reached middle-income status without undergoing an urban transition. Therefore, they see cities as engines of growth, bringing people and businesses together into dense environments, thereby fostering productivity and innovation. This in turn generates job opportunities, from which residents in cities can earn better incomes and improve their livelihoods.

African cities, however, are mostly defying this trajectory. Whilst the continent is undergoing the fastest urban transition that the world has experienced to date, this has not been coupled with the growth that economists would have predicted. In fact, in many cases, the rapid urbanisation is resulting in growing poverty in urban areas, exacerbated by the lack of investments in infrastructure and public services.

Ikoyi, an upper-class suburb of Lagos, Nigeria, is pictured in the foreground, with Victoria Island and Eko Atlantic in the distance. Photo credit: Reginald Bassey / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Not any urbanisation, well-managed urbanisation

To explain this phenomenon, economists point to the fact that urbanisation in Africa is not well managed, stemming from a poor governance environment. As a result, the private sector shies away from investing, leaving a lack of job opportunities for the large population moving to or being born in these cities. This underinvestment also means that insufficient finances are being generated from taxes to fund much needed infrastructure and services that make cities liveable, such as transport, housing, water, and sanitation. This in turn leads to further deterioration of the urban space.

One antidote – as first proposed by Paul Romer in a TedTalk in 2010, and now adopted by a growing set of his followers – is so-called charter cities. The term charter city has started to take on a wide variety of definitions since its inception. In essence, however, it is a city in a developing country, which would be temporarily administered by a different state from the one where it is located. This would divorce the city from its national governance structures and allow it to operate under stronger institutional and governance structures, particularly in the form of laws, policies, and the judiciary.

The idea is that this preferable governance environment would attract investment from private sector firms, thereby bringing jobs, raising wages, and living standards for residents, and unlocking a positive virtuous cycle of economic growth and development. The example often cited by charter cities advocates – but also highly disputed – is the case of Hong Kong administered under British rule.

Why the economics of charter cities don’t work

Notwithstanding the major concerns of the neo-colonial implications of such a model – also illustrated by the Hong Kong example – even from an economics perspective, these types of cities are highly unlikely to take off, particularly in Africa. Perhaps the strongest evidence for this is that there are no successful examples to date of establishing a charter city in a developing country, as per the model envisaged by Romer.

There are now, however, a growing number of greenfield “new city” or “smart city” projects across the continent that try to mimic some of these prescriptions, ostensibly to attract the private sector and generate jobs. Leading the charge in this area is Nigeria, which is planning over 25 million m² of new cities.

For these types of cities, the notion of building from scratch is often used as an argument to avoid the political and financial cost of retrofitting and to decongest already overcrowded cities. However, developing greenfield sites is expensive and will divert much needed, scarce resources away from places where they are required.

An example is Mount Hampden, that is currently being built 11 miles outside Harare in Zimbabwe. The current price-tag is around 50 billion USD, with some of this financing already being lent by China. Yet Zimbabwe is currently not even able to generate enough foreign exchange to import sufficient food. As highlighted by the opposition member of parliament, Tendai Biti, the construction of this city is “mortgaging Zimbabwe”.

FINAL STRETCH: Zimbabwe's new six-storey, US$140 million parliament building in Mount Hampden, 18km north-west of Harare, has entered "the final stage of construction" and "will be presented to the people of Zimbabwe in the near future", the Chinese embassy says pic.twitter.com/ZlEU2WjZhH

— ZimLive (@zimlive) March 14, 2022

New cities are also expensive in other ways. In particular, the economic productivity of cities is founded on how well they can connect the private sector to markets, and residents to jobs, to each other and to essential goods and services. Furthermore, connections between cities and rural areas and – in an increasingly globalised world – to regional and global markets, are key determinants of investment. Hong Kong, for example, is an island city state that is highly connected to different trade routes.

Yet the growing infrastructure deficit – particularly in the road and rail networks across sub-Saharan Africa, exacerbated by the fact that many cities are landlocked – means that the cost of doing business in African cities is high, irrespective of what infrastructure exists within them. No isolated city can or will resolve these more systemic challenges, yet they will critically impact what can happen in such cities and how much they cost to build.

Matapi flats in Mbare, a high-density residential area in Harare, Zimbabwe.  Photo credit: Yann Macherez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In addition, especially operating in settings with challenging land tenure, the anticipation of a large influx of investment will inevitably lead to speculation, which in turn will add to costs for the private sector. This can be seen across Africa, even in new cities that have not actually been completed, with the cost of property already far outpricing the average citizen. For example, in Eko Atlantic in Nigeria, the current buying price for a two-to-three-bedroomed apartment is between 800,000 USD and 1 million USD. In Senegal’s Diamniadio City, even though the housing developments are yet to be built, land prices have increased so substantially that it is already clear the average Senegalese citizen will not be able to live there. These cities will merely become enclaves for the super-rich.

Politics is messy

From the political perspective, unless new governance structures and institutional structures are implemented by force, as was done in colonial times, it is naïve to assume that institutions and policies at city level can be fully divorced, and therefore distinct, from their national context and political settlement. The key example here is Honduras, the only place to date where Romer was welcomed as part of a group to actually implement a charter city, including the governance components. Ultimately, however, the law enabling charter cities was repealed, as a means to “recovering its sovereignty”.

Politicians with short-term time horizons like to hear that there are silver bullets. The promise of the charter city is that by starting afresh, one can ignore the difficulties of retrofitting the cities that already exist, or even planning the cities that are growing. Instead, one can start anew on a clear, easy path to growth and development. As illustrated, these are risky and extremely costly endeavours that crowd out other opportunities. From a political perspective, they will inevitably fail, as they come head-to-head with the realities of institution building. 

Yet cities are inherently political. The messy process of institution building at a local level, whilst it may be lengthy, is what ultimately results in more stable and, importantly, locally appropriate institutions. The most successful cities we have today, that deliver on liveability, productivity, and sustainability, are ones that have undergone these processes over centuries. They are also cities that work for the majority, rather than the privileged few.

Header photo credit: mtcurado / Getty Images (via Canva Pro).  Aerial shot over Victoria Island and Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria, Lagos.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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

By Michael Danquah and Kunal Sen

Structural transformation involves the movement of workers from low-productivity sectors to high-productivity sectors. It has historically been associated with a shift from agrarian economies to more industrial economies based around urban areas, as seen in many Western nations as well as the Southeast Asian giants. For these economies, it is thought to have been crucial to economic growth and poverty reduction, by creating jobs and improving labour productivity.

In many African countries, however, the prospect of a thriving manufacturing industry seems difficult to realise. Urbanisation has taken place without structural transformation with the share of employment in manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa far below South Asia, even though South Asia has a lower urbanisation rate than sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 1). Further, African cities’ economic sectors are dominated by low-productivity, informal enterprises, most of which are found in the services sector – specifically wholesale and retail trade, while a few enterprises are engaged in informal manufacturing. Large segments of Africa’s urban population work in the low-paid, informal wage economy, often self-employed. 

Figure 1: Share of employment in manufacturing vs urbanisation rate (2015), by region

Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation rate, or the share of the population that lives in urban areas, is low but growing rapidly. What is unique about sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation rate (compared to other regions), is that the region’s urban population is expanding despite a notably smaller share of workers employed in manufacturing.

Note: Urbanisation rate is calculated by dividing the urban population by the total population.

Source: Authors’ calculations using the GGDC/UNU-WIDER’s Economic Transformation Database and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI).

Disentangling the connections between Africa’s cities and the slow pace of structural change will be essential for creating growth and reducing poverty, as structural transformation has the potential to foster economic diversification and inclusive growth. For effective policymaking, it is important to understand the drivers of structural transformation at the city level. It is also crucial to understand what alternative patterns of structural transformation – that is, leapfrog development (economic transition from agriculture to services, jumping the manufacturing stage) – might mean for the sustainable growth of African cities.

For example, the economic landscape in Greater Accra, the capital of Ghana, provides a picture of this experience. At the sub-city level in Accra city region, economic activities are dominated by the services sector largely made up of informal enterprises. The share of manufacturing establishments and employment are very low compared to services (Figure 2). Productivity at the city region is generally low, but it is not homogenous across the different areas of the city. This leapfrog development (from agriculture to services) has not resulted in the creation of productive jobs in the city.

Figure 2: Shares of establishments in each sector and shares of manufacturing employment across districts in Accra city region

Most Ghanaian firms are engaged in the services sector, while only very few are involved in agriculture. The share of firms in industry varies from 15 percent to 36 percent, depending on the district. In Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), only about one in ten workers is employed in manufacturing.

Source: Ghana Integrated Business and Establishment Survey (IBES), 2014/2015.

Moreover, the organisational type (private limited) and formality and institutional performance of city governments seem to correlate with low productivity of enterprises.[1] Some of the major constraints to enhancing productivity and economic transformation in the city include access to long-term finance, high cost of production especially for energy, land, transportation, and space for business operations, higher costs for public services due to bureaucratic tendencies by city officials, and excessive influence of political leadership and interference at the sub-city level.[2] City governments would need greater capacities, resources, and support to improve the performance and productivity of enterprises – particularly the establishment of new manufacturing enterprises in the city.

Further, there is room to transfer some of their services to the private sector, work together with relevant institutions to carry out appropriate land reforms, and seek investments in critical infrastructure that would help the growth of high-productivity enterprises. Given the rapid increase in the size of African cities, as more workers move to urban areas from rural areas in search for jobs, urbanisation must be accompanied by structural transformation in Africa. Consequently, policies that foster productivity growth among formal and informal enterprises, as well as deliver productive jobs for Africa’s urban workforce will be critical to the success of the continent in economic development in the years ahead. 

Figure 3: Africa’s infrastructure story

Note: African DFIs are Development Finance Institutions headquartered in Africa (eg the African Development Bank). Consortiums are two or more construction companies or governments holding an equal split of a project’s ownership, building activities, or funding activities. Governments include governments or government departments within the African continent. International DFIs are those headquartered outside Africa (eg the World Bank). Private Domestic firms are African construction firms/financial institutions headquartered in the same African country where it is constructing or funding a project. Single Countries are those that could not be grouped together according to shared geography.

Source: Deloitte. Africa Construction Trends Report, 2021.

[1] Iddrisu, M, Ohemeng, W and Danquah, M (2022). “Structural transformation in Accra”. ACRC Quantitative Report on Accra, mimeo.

[2] Domfeh, G (2022). “Structural transformation in Accra”. ACRC Qualitative Report on Accra, mimeo.

This blog post is republished with permission from the Brookings Institution. Read the original viewpoint article via the Brookings Institution blog and in Chapter 7 of the Foresight Africa 2023 report.

Header photo credit: Dave Primov / iStock. Women food sellers in Accra, Ghana. Most Ghanaian firms are engaged in the services sector, including wholesale and retail trade.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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

Header photo credit: Chris Jordan

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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