African cities growing fastest
It has become the world’s most rapidly urbanised continent
● Karim Kane is a carpenter, not a speculator. But the plot of land he bought a decade ago is worth nearly 25 times what he paid for it. In 2007, the village chief sold it to him for the equivalent of about $450. Kane built a house for his wife and six children on land that today he reckons is worth nearly $11,000 (R166,000).
The area is little more than muddy hills with scattered plots of land given over to cows and goats. Pedlars lead donkey carts loaded with plastic cans of water. But despite its semi-rural appearance, Kane has no doubt that he is now a resident of Mali’s capital. “I’m a Bamakois,” he says, using the French word for a citizen of Bamako.
Almost unnoticed, Africa has become the world’s most rapidly urbanising continent. From 2018 to 2035, the UN predicts that the world’s 10 fastest-growing cities will be African. It’s a trend that has already enveloped Kane, whose land has been swallowed up by Yirimadio, the fastest-growing part of Bamako, which may itself be the fastest-growing city in Africa.
Shacks built by people recently arrived from the countryside jostle with houses being built by Bamakois who are snapping up cheaper plots of land on the city edge. As Bamako has grown exponentially it poses huge logistical problems for cash-starved authorities that are replicated across the continent.
According to a World Bank study, 472million people in Sub-Saharan Africa live in cities. High birth rates and migration from the countryside mean that by 2040 Africa’s urban population will more than double to 1-billion, it says, a rate that far outpaces urbanisation elsewhere in the world.
Think-tank City Mayors says Mali’s capital has an annual expansion rate of 4.5%.
Estimates from the UN say other cities, including Dar es Salaam, a city of nearly 5-million in Tanzania, are growing even faster.
Some of Africa’s megacities, including Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital of 21-million, and Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, are sucking in hundreds of thousands of new people a year.
Urbanisation is what helped ignite the “Africa rising” narrative promoted by consultancy McKinsey, whose 2016 “Lions on the Move II” report highlighted cities as an engine of productivity.
From 2015-2045, McKinsey found, 24million more Africans would be living in cities each year, compared to 11-million in India and 9-million in China. “Urbanisation has a strong correlation with the rate of real GDP growth,” it said, adding that “productivity in cities is more than double that in the countryside”.
The World Bank estimates Bamako’s population today at 3.5-million, more than 10 times its size at independence in 1960.
But managing urban growth, with its associated problems of service provision, housing, crime and congestion, has become one of the biggest challenges on the continent. “For me this is a catastrophe foretold,” says Issa N’Diaye, a professor of philosophy at the University of Bamako.
“Bamako is a time-bomb.” He says it lacks the resources and institutional capacity to cope with explosive growth.
Rocketing land prices have led to corruption, N’Diaye says, alleging that land allocated for schools in his own neighbourhood has been sold off by unscrupulous officials.
Rapid urban expansion has also left people bereft of services, he says. “There’s been no planning of the road system, water drainage, electricity or urban transport. The city is becoming more and more unlivable.”
Since 2005, Yirimadio’s population alone has risen from about 20,000 to 190,000, according to officials from Muso, a health organisation that serves the area. In parts of Yirimadio, locals have campaigned for a standing water pipe; in others they have dug their own wells.
Yuba Diakite left what he says was the tedium of farming to try his luck at accounting in Bamako. The women in his rented quarters, where whole families are squashed into a single room, get up before dawn as they would in the village, he says.
“Our women exhaust themselves over this question of water.”
Somik Lall, the World Bank’s lead economist for urban development in Africa, says its urbanisation is running ahead of its income. Africa, he says, is 40% urban with a per capita GDP of roughly $1,100. By the time Asia reached 40% urbanisation, its GDP per capita was $3,500, he says.
Bamako’s expansion has been rapid because of people fleeing north and central Mali, unstable since an al-Qaeda-affiliated group took control in 2012, before being expelled by a French-led military invasion.
For me this is a catastrophe foretold
Issa N’Diaye
Professor of philosophy at the University of Bamako