Events

Africa’s cities are growing fast and jobs, housing, electricity, water and security are struggling to keep pace with the people who are streaming in from the countryside.

Africa’s urban areas are already home to almost 500 million people and will double in size in the next 25 years with the most populous cities growing by four percent a year. The scale of the challenge is enormous. Cities will need to provide homes, roads, water, power and, perhaps most importantly, employment, for hundreds of millions of new city dwellers over the next few decades.

Future of African Cities’ project has looked at six African cities chosen because they confront very different problems, so that we can start to answer the question: What must be done to make cities good places to live where work opportunities grow and the cost of living is kept in check.

Based on six papers on Rabat-Sale, Lagos, Cape Town, Mombasa, Hargeisa and Buffalo City, the manuscript for Where the Rubber Hits the Road seeks to provide city officials, planners, investors and officials with an idea of the key challenges they need to overcome if we are to meet these daunting challenges. This event will discuss the manuscript’s findings, and the documentary which accompanies it.

The policy Center for the New South will contribute to the event and will be represented by its Senior Fellow Mr Khalid Chegraoui.