chapter 2 RECENT SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS IN AFRICA
2.4 CONCLUSIONS AND KEY MESSAGES
unmet need for family planning and its awareness creation.
Africa’s urbanization reflects considerable variation, as countries at different income levels have urbanized at different rates. Unlike global trends urban–rural differences in welfare and living standards in Africa do not seem to narrow with increasing urbanization.
Rural–urban migration is a rational response to access social and economic opportunities.
Many urban municipal authorities lack the capacity to plan for urban growth and accommodate the migrants who end up settling in shanty towns and slums, which can stimulate transmission of AIDS, TB, and other diseases. Such migrants often swap rural poverty for its urban variant. Investment in basic urban services and in capacity building of subnational governments, especially in secondary cities, to manage urban growth should therefore be a high policy priority for inclusive growth.
The policy response to urbanization needs to cover the entire rural–urban continuum, including secondary cities, reflecting the growing recognition that the distinction between secondary towns and large cities is central for analysis and policy, and the composition of urbanization is at least as important as its aggregate rate for inclusive growth and distribution.
The poor in Africa live much further below the extreme poverty threshold than those in other regions, with an average consumption of about 60 per cent of the international poverty line. This points to the challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal target of eliminating poverty on the continent by 2030.
Even though inequality has declined in many African countries since 2000, average within-country inequality levels are high and hamper the poverty-reducing effect of economic growth.
Nearly 50 per cent of Africa’s labour force works in agriculture, a sector that reduced its share in total GDP in almost all African subregions in 1990–2012.
Low agricultural productivity depresses demand and wages, and slows poverty reduction.
At 2.6 per cent a year, Africa has the fastest rate of population growth in the world. In 10 countries it exceeds 3 per cent a year. The slow decline in fertility rates (slower than child mortality rates) and its virtual stalling in the 14 countries with half the continent’s population delay the demographic transition and checks the opportunity to unlock the demographic dividend.
Despite gains, gender inequality remains a key development challenge in Africa. Gender gaps in primary education have largely closed, but with wide variations across subregions. Poor girls face a significant schooling disadvantage in most countries, which is worse at lower incomes.9
African women combine family responsibilities with labour market engagement in the informal economy, including own-account work, where low levels of education, poor conditions of work and low remuneration limit their opportunities for obtaining a fair return on their labour.
Increased child survival rates and women’s education, income and their participation in the labour force, seem to have little impact on fertility. Policymakers should combine long-term development programs, such as provision of social infrastructure and improving the status of women, with short-term interventions, such as meeting the
Most of the urbanization
discourse focuses on the national
rate of urbanization, obscuring
key analytical features and often
narrowing the policy debate to
issues concerning large cities.
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ENDNOTES
1 Except in East and Central Africa in 2000–2012.
2 Except in East Africa where its share of GDP is 17 per cent.
3 Momentum effects are conditioned by population age structure at the starting point of a projection. In countries undergoing a demographic transition with a young age profile, the population will continue to grow because births by a large group of women in the reproductive age cohort will exceed mortality.
4 According to the theory of demographic transition, it takes some time for people to adjust their fertility behaviour.
5 Gabon, Lesotho, Libya, Madagascar, Namibia and Swaziland.
6 Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Togo, Uganda and Zambia.
7 This excludes the serious disturbances that led to population movements during the 1990s, and massive resettlements as wars ended in Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan.
8 Rural–urban migration can play a major role in fos-tering growth and poverty reduction by reallocating resources more efficiently—geographically and sectorally—across the economy. China offers a spec-tacular example of its transforming role, where an estimated 16 per cent of GDP growth in 1987–2005 came from such migration (World Bank, 2007).
9 Particularly more important is gender parity in sec-ondary education, which has huge implications for expediting the demographic (fertility) transition as well as in banking the potential demographic dividend.
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3.
AN OVERVIEW OF URBANIZATION AND STRUCTURAL
TRANSFORMATION IN AFRICA
U
rbanization is one of the defining forces of the planet’s 21st century development.In 1950 the urban share of the world’s population was 30 per cent, but by 2050 it may well be 66 per cent. Nearly 90 per cent of the increase will be in Africa and Asia, the fastest urbanizing global regions (UNDESA, 2014).
Africa’s urban transition overlaps with a demographic transition—moving from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility—which is occurring across huge swathes of the continent.1 Urban centres lead this demographic transition, with its associated demographic dividend a positive factor for economic development.
It is therefore indispensable to harness the forces of urbanization for Africa’s sustained growth and structural transformation,2 including the economic and social challenges flagged in the previous two chapters. Multi-dimensional urbanization shapes all three pillars of sustainable development:
economic development, social development and environmental protection (UNDESA, 2014). And while urbanization is not a sufficient condition to generate economic growth, with the right urban form—the spatial layout of cities—and patterns, it can bring major productive advantages to industrial value chains. Managing the urban transition is thus essential for economic growth and the well-being of Africa’s urban and rural populations.
Deliberate policy responses are required to optimize urbanization and minimize challenges.
They involve balancing agglomeration economies and diseconomies to exploit urban scale and externalities, preventing slum formation by forward planning and investing in infrastructure and public goods and creating jobs to absorb swelling urban populations including for women and young people.
These interrelated challenges and opportunities are complex and best handled through inter-sector and multi-level governance. Policies need to be coordinated through national development planning frameworks to link urban space and economic development—as well as the public and private sectors—and to be supported by investment and urban planning at national and local levels.
Urbanization is one of the
defining forces of the planet’s
21st century development.
the 1950s (figure 3.1), hitting 40 per cent of the continent’s total in 2014 and projected to reach 56 per cent by 2050 (UNDESA, 2014). Urbanization The world is increasingly urban, and Africa, along with
parts of Asia, is now an epicentre of urbanization.
Africa’s urban populations have been growing since The three thematic chapters of the 2017 ERA (3, 4 and 5) aim to extract lessons and policies—
grounded in theory and practice—from the evidence on urbanization’s role in promoting industrial development and structural transformation in Africa. They raise, in broad terms, the policy issues fundamental to establishing and overseeing productive urban systems and present the trade-offs facing policymakers.
This chapter presents an overview of the mega-trends of urbanization and structural transformation with their significance for Africa’s development, outlining the synergetic ties between the two processes and then debunking some of the old
“myths” about urbanization. Chapter 4 examines in
more detail the nexus between the two elements, using a conceptual framework of drivers, enablers, barriers and policy levers. Chapter 5 highlights country experiences related to the urbanization–
industrialization nexus from case studies, showing how urban demand, productive systems of cities and productive cities themselves promote industrialization. Looking to the future, all three chapters present policy implications.