Anna Tibaijuka PHOTOS: WEF
Anna Tibaijuka: Exclusive Interview
By Peter Guest | Published: 28 July, 2010
Africa’s urbanisation must be understood and managed to prevent growing inequalities from becoming a source of conflict, according to Anna Tibaijuka, under-secretary-general of the United Nations and executive director of urban development body UN Habitat.
While the rate of urbanisation has not increased dramatically in recent years, there remains an inexorable global shift towards city living. The UN predicts that by 2030, more people in the developing world will live in urban environments than in rural communities. By 2050, 67 percent of inhabitants of the developing world will live in cities, compared to 86 percent in more developed economies.
Currently, 40 percent of Africans live in urban centres, although there is disparity between the sub-regions. North and Southern Africa have already passed their “tipping points” – in 2005 and 1993, respectively – and have urban populations in excess of 50 percent of their totals. East Africa has the lowest rate of any region globally, at 23.7 percent.
Urbanisation is widely accepted as both a driver and an inevitable consequence of economic development. In the vast majority of cases there is a clear correlation between the level of urbanisation in a country and its per capita GDP. However, from the UN’s numbers that correlation appears weaker in sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions. Furthermore, African urbanisation is markedly less equitable than in the rest of the world. More than 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population lives in slums or informal settlements.
Part of the concern, according to Ms Tibaijuka, is that in an African context urbanisation has often been “rapid and chaotic” and it has to a large extent been driven not by the creation of jobs in cities but by negative push factors – rural youth facing environmental stress and population pressures on agricultural land. In this sense, mass migration of African youth to cities is “premature”, she says.
Ms Tibaijuka, a Tanzanian academic and politician, ends her second and final four year term as head of UN Habitat this summer, having overseen the organisation’s evolution from the UN Centre for Human Settlements, a relatively small agency based in Nairobi, into a fully-fledged programme for urban development. For the past decade she has been a strident advocate of the necessity to understand and manage this most pervasive of demographic trends. Above all, she has campaigned for greater awareness of the risks inherent in the growing “urban divide”.
There are, she acknowledges, two competing narratives regarding urbanisation. The trend is routinely trumpeted as a major engine for Africa’s growth. A recent McKinsey Global Institute report forecast that by 2030, the continent’s top 18 cities will have a combined spending power of $1,300bn. Concentrating populations with increasing productivity and incomes, as well as the emergence of an urban middle class, create opportunities for investment and the sales of consumer goods. Furthermore, cities bring more people closer to infrastructure and services that they would struggle to reach in rural settings.
Ms Tibaijuka is keen to inject some caution into this argument. Firstly, she says: “Proximity to services should not be confused with access to services.” Education and health are often lacking amongst poorer communities, exacerbating an “urban divide” that she believes must be addressed if Africa’s cities are to become stable engines of growth.
