The fastest growing city in Africa

Is the claim of a fascinating new paper on Juba by Richard Grant and Daniel Thompson (HT: Sean Fox).

Juba, the capital of South Sudan, is the fastest growing city in Africa, exhibiting the most rapid urban expansion and growth ever to take place in the region. Despite its explosive demographic and infrastructural expansion, the urban explosion has received virtually no attention from urban scholars.

since 2005 [Juba] recorded spectacular urban expansion: at upwards of 12.5% per annum, the city’s growth is among the fastest rates of urbanization in human history. [Population] has more than doubled in the past seven years to at least 500,000-600,000 by 2012.

On the urban economy:

The sudden and massive influx of development aid and investment drives local property and consumer markets 

Juba functions within a highly unequal cash economy: while Juba can be among the most expensive cities in Africa (for example US$200 for a basic hotel room and seasonal food price hikes); simultaneously, subsistence wild food harvesting is necessary for many food-insecure urbanites.

On urban livelihoods:

the urban poor concentrate on firewood collection, informal construction (digging pit latrines, stone breaking, and mudding traditional dwellings), charcoal making (exacerbating deforestation), petty trade (tea and food selling), motorcycle taxi (boda-boda) driving, and brewing alcohol.

And on rural "land grabs":

analyses showing approximately 5% of total land is under cultivation 

Between 2007 and 2010, 8% of South Sudan’s total land area was acquired by international private interests (firms from the US, Egypt, UAE, and UK are the largest investors)

New OPM research

1. An evaluation of Oxfam's Emergency Food Security and Livelihoods Urban Programme.

2. How to making agricultural financing work in Rwanda (it's about post-harvest storage & marketing, not inputs)

3. How savings banks can provide better services for the poor

4. Assessing value for money of donor support to the financial sector in Kenya

Urbanization in Africa

Sean Fox, a cities expert at the LSE has a great new post up at the Africa@LSE Blog discussing how incorrect analysis has been leading to poor policy for years.

The popular mental model is that there is massive rural-urban migration in search of jobs.

"Since the mid-1970s, African governments have increasingly adopted policies designed to inhibit or discourage people from moving into urban areas. Today, approximately 80% of African countries have policies in place to prevent rural-urban migration. At the same time, international development organisations increasingly withdrew support for urban development initiatives in favour of rural development projects, often justified by the argument (among others) that improving standards of living in rural areas will help to mitigate the growth of urban poverty."

The trouble is, most urban population growth is actually just natural growth. And the rural-urban migration that does exist is driven by a range of factors, not just jobs, such as a "desire to escape age or gender discrimination in their communities, to find a wife or husband, to seek adventure in the “bright lights” of the big city, or to escape rural serfdom."

Which is actually pretty clear when you just look at the data. This is rural and urban population growth in Africa since the 1960s, based on the World Development Indicators (chart stolen from Ian MacAuslan). Cities are growing fast, but so are rural populations. 

And the last word from Sean;

"Simply put, the rapid growth of Africa’s urban population is being driven primarily by rapid population growth in urban areas, not rural-urban migration ... For those interested in easing demographic pressure in urban areas, the only humane policy option is to try to reduce population growth by promoting fertility decline through voluntary family planning initiatives. And for those interested in promoting economic development in the region, investment in urban areas should be top of the policy agenda." 

Read the whole thing here. 

Lenny Henry in Kibera

Four British celebrities try living and working in Kibera for a week on the £1-£2 average daily income (hattip: my mum).

Does media pessimism on migration and urbanisation get any worse than this?

China's rural poor left stranded as urbanites race ahead 

As workers leave the countryside in the hope of better pay, the communities they leave behind face increasing poverty

... 

Wang Fang and her husband, Chen Shuangfu, arrived in the provincial capital, Guiyang, 10 years ago, with just 10 yuan in their pockets. Their hard, unappealing work - collecting and sorting rubbish for recycling - earns them as much as 20,000 yuan a year, compared with their 1,000 yuan income back home. But their rural hukou means they are not entitled to many services - and, since the hukou is inherited, neither are their sons. (The Guardian)

So,  a couple living in rural poverty increase their income by a factor of TWENTY, from about £100 a year (at market exchange rates) to £2,000 a year, JUST BY MOVING TO THE PROVINCIAL CAPITAL, and you still want to find GRIPES!? Are you INSANE? Totally innumerate?!! Or know of some other secret government policy that nobody else has heard of that can increase the incomes of those living in rural poverty by MORE than 2000%?!! Get a grip!

Not for a second to deny that there are challenges to be overcome in the process of urbanisation. But writing long miserable articles about the woes of rural poverty without for a second stopping to celebrate the absolute wondrous miracle that is overnight 2000% pay increases for the poor, is insane. I would sort rubbish for recycling in a hovel for a 2000% pay raise. Wouldn't you?

That is the real story here. Not the fact that some poor rural people are still poor and rural.

The New Capital of South Sudan

Is apparently going to be at Ramciel, which will be renamed "John Garang City."

Report trickling out of Juba has it that the council of ministers, today, have officially approved the relocation of the present capital city of the Republic of South Sudan from Juba to Ramciel (say Rham-chieel). 

In another interesting twist to this breaking news, Ramciel itself has been officially renamed as John Garang in honor of the SPLM/A founding leader and the current tentative founding father of the state of South Sudan.

via Paanluel Wël, probably the best actual South Sudanese blogger.

And from the Sudan Tribune:

Ramciel or Ramkiel, which is few hundreds of kilometers away from Juba, is geographically at the center of South Sudan and is almost no man’s land ...

Marial said the process of planning, surveying and putting in place the infrastructures needed may take three to five years to complete.

I can't even find the place on a map. Good luck to the 2016-17 ODI fellows then. 

In Praise of Slums: Part 2

Some wisdom from David Week on his architecture for development blog:

Urban migration is a necessary and good thing.
It’s essential to rural development, to urban development, and poverty reduction in an era in which people are being helped to live longer, but have not yet begun to reproduce less.
However, it cannot in itself create rural development, urban development or poverty reduction. It has to be steered by policies which accept it as fact, and base rural, urban and economic development on that fact.
The fact that migration creates slums is not the fault of the migrants, and the solution does not lie in attempting to prevent their arrival: a Quixotic goal akin to stopping a river.
Rather: Accept these immigrants, and welcome them by planning for their arrival through tenure, services, public transport, planned neighbourhoods, and the creation of economic opportunities.

In praise of slums

"As the fastest urbanising continent in the world, Africa is not only confronted with the challenge of improving the lives of slum dwellers but also the challenge of preventing the formation of new slums," said Joan Clos, executive director of UN-Habitat.

Really Joan? What's your counterfactual? An imaginary nice clean yuppie living in a nice clean neighbourhood? An imaginary happy-clappy rural farmer?

Slums are created when people leave their rural village to go in search of a better life/more money in the city. Slums aren't some kind of alien cancerous growth, they are the result of natural economic forces (*cough* WDR 2009 *cough*), of people becoming more productive when they are closer together, and can more easily exchange their ideas, their labour and their services. Africa may be the fastest urbanising continent in the world but that's probably because it was the least urbanised to begin with. Urbanisation is a good thing.

The breakneck transformation of a rural population into a predominantly urban one is neither good nor bad on its own, says UN-Habitat. 

But

They are already inundated with slums and a tripling of urban populations could spell disaster, unless urgent action is initiated today. This situation threatens stability and also entire nations," it said.

Enough with the alarmist nonsense please. For a look at some of the life and vitality and optimism of urban Africa, check out the BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos.

The Animal Kingdom

How about that for a new name for Southern Sudan?

So fine, after about 42 different people have sent me the link to the Animal City plan story in Southern Sudan, I feel duty-bound, as probably the best economics blog (previously) in Southern Sudan, to comment.

I think I may have actually seen this poster ages ago, or one very much like it, in the office of the Undersecretary for Transport, but not really registered it because I was running around frantically getting stuff signed or getting revisions to budgets or something, and simply dismissed this as yet another bizarre oddity, not really to be questioned.

Anyway I have sympathy for Peter Martell’s view:

Those 'wacky Africans', eh?

The world giggles at those ‘crazy Sudanese’, as though criticizing them for believing a better future is possible.

The key point, that southerners dare to dream of planning their own nation, of providing decent services and housing for the people to replace the towns left in ruins by decades of war against a regime that brutalized this land, is lost behind the patronising international sniggers of the safari shapes.

But what gets me the most though, is those words in the blank spaces around the Giraffe.

Protected Areas.

As if Southern Sudan, probably one of the least densely populated and least urbanised areas on the planet, is in any danger whatsoever of serious environmental degradation through overpopulation, and needs to maintain some kind of green belt around its cities.

Now this is pure speculation, but I think that the warped vision of urbanisation and economic geography held by the Sudanese government is a reflection of the warped vision of urbanisation and economic geography held by the international development community.

Ideas, memes, spread like viruses. Being a new state, a place like Southern Sudan looks outwards to the rest of the world, to its friends and partners who stood with it during the war, to learn.

And by god we have a responsibility not to give them shit ideas.

Rural idylls are generally not idyllic. People generally move to towns and cities because they are better. This is not a bad thing. Spontaneous, slightly anarchic, urban development is not a bad thing. For a good summary go and read the 2009 World Development Report, an annual “state of the profession” report which the profession hasn’t quite caught up with yet.

Alex de Waal on Urbanisation

This is not wholly negative. Sudan’s cities, while poorly planned, have better services  than  the rural areas, and are more stable and  less violent. The urban economies are dynamic.

Erm, better services, less violence, dynamic economies, is it just me or does that sound like something slightly better than not wholly negative?

Heinrich Boll Foundation, Sudan: No Easy Ways Ahead