# Mark Roberts on Catalyzing Jobs & Economic Growth in African Cities

An episode of [The Africa Urban Lab Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1886680160), 29 Oct 2026, 1 h 02 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2604291/episodes/20042453-mark-roberts-on-catalyzing-jobs-economic-growth-in-african-cities.mp3

Our guest is Mark Roberts — Lead Urban Economist at the World Bank and a lead author of the Bank’s new flagship report, Sub-Saharan Africa’s Urban Awakening: Catalyzing Economic Growth and Job Creation, to which the Africa Urban Lab contributed. We discuss why fast-growing African cities do not automatically become productive ones, exploring what it takes to turn rapid urbanization into economic growth and job creation. It’s a conversation about the policies, investments, and institutions needed to unlock the economic potential of Africa’s cities.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker: Welcome to the Africa Urban Lab Podcast.
[0:02] Speaker: I'm your host, kurtis Locker.
[0:04] Speaker: On today's episode, I speak with Mark Roberts.
[0:08] Speaker: Mark is a senior urban economist in the World Bank's urban and land global practice, and he is one of the lead authors of the bank's New Fledge report on Sub-Saharan Africa's which has just recently launched and which the Africa Urban contributed to.
[0:25] Speaker: And so this report is the subject of our conversation today.
[0:30] Speaker: Before joining the bank, Mark was a lecturer in spatial at the University of Cambridge and co-editor of the Economic Analysis.
[0:40] Speaker: Mark's published many papers on cities, on spatial and on the demographics of urban transition.
[0:48] Speaker: Enjoy the show.
[0:50] Speaker: Mark Roberts, welcome to the podcast.
[0:58] Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Kes.
[0:59] Speaker 2: It's really great to be here.
[1:01] Speaker 2: I enjoyed the podcast series, so it's a real honor to be
[1:06] Speaker: So we're gonna talk about this new World Bank flagship report.
[1:09] Speaker: It's called For Listeners, Sub Saharan Africa's Urban Catalyzing Economic Growth and Job Creation.
[1:15] Speaker: It's just been recently launched.
[1:18] Speaker: So first, just to set the stage, what are the main messages or the main message of the report?
[1:24] Speaker: And then we'll dive in from there.
[1:27] Speaker 2: Right, the backdrop is the very rapid urbanization that seeing in Sub-Saharan Africa.
[1:32] Speaker 2: So over the last 50 years, the region's added about 740 people to its towns, to its cities.
[1:41] Speaker 2: But then over the next 25 years, we see that the region will add almost the same number of people, actually a little more, 780 million people to its towns and cities.
[1:54] Speaker 2: So it's going to reach an urban population of 1.7 billion, and that's going to take place by 2050.
[2:01] Speaker 2: And so that kind of near doubling of urban population is to happen in half the time it's taken to get to the level of urban population.
[2:11] Speaker 2: And by the middle of the century, urbanization will be complete.
[2:17] Speaker 2: And so there's this kind of time-bound opportunity in the to be able to take advantage of this urbanization to drive economic growth, contribute to the creation of more better jobs in the region.
[2:33] Speaker 2: So really the report is about how to better be able to do We offer some proposals in terms of policies, distinguish different types of urban area.
[2:44] Speaker: Yeah, and I know the World Bank has put out some other reports on African cities in the past.
[2:50] Speaker: For example, the one by Semek Lal, Henderson, and Venables back in 2017, I believe.
[2:56] Speaker: So what is distinct and new and novel about this new report just been recently launched?
[3:03] Speaker 2: That is a great report by Sonic and colleagues back in 2017.
[3:07] Speaker 2: But the main focus of that report is on cities.
[3:11] Speaker 2: And in the Korean reports, we try to go beyond that.
[3:15] Speaker 2: We recognize not only the existing built-up area of the set of cities in the region, but the fact that with very urban population growth, so comes very rapid urban expansion.
[3:27] Speaker 2: And so we go beyond the existing built-up area of cities to also inquire in terms of okay, planning for urban expansion in the peripheries of those cities.
[3:39] Speaker 2: The urban area of cities is basically going to double over next 25 years.
[3:45] Speaker 2: Historically, much of the urban expansion has been relatively informal, not necessarily leading to kind of optimal city in terms of connectivity to jobs and opportunities, and the basis for agglomeration economies.
[4:03] Speaker 2: So that's one way that we go beyond the 2017 report.
[4:08] Speaker 2: And then even beyond the kind of big cities and peripheries of those cities which are expanding, Sub-Saharan Africa has many small towns which are rapidly growing.
[4:20] Speaker 2: And these small towns are partly rural still, partly urban, the transition very quickly, natural population growth and so these towns are rapidly expanding.
[4:32] Speaker 2: And so we basically have this typology of different types of urban places, the cities as they currently exist, the of those cities, and then these small towns and offer tell the policy solutions or suggestions for the three different of urban area to address the main challenges associated with each type of place.
[4:55] Speaker: Yeah, and this was one of the things reading through and being involved in the report that stood out to me is past reports seem to be just focused on kind of larger urban agglomerations.
[5:04] Speaker: This one has tailored prescriptions for different types of of urbanization, right?
[5:12] Speaker: And you have dense, denser cities, slightly less dense areas right on the outskirts of fast-growing cities, even less dense but still important towns on far-flung areas the country.
[5:24] Speaker: So I think that was unique and interesting.
[5:26] Speaker: But so zooming out a bit, you've, Mark, you've worked on in South Asia, in Indonesia, in Latin America, now in
[5:37] Speaker: So I guess I wanted to ask: are there things unique about the
[5:43] Speaker: way African urbanization is unfolding compared to these other regions that you've also worked in and written about?
[5:51] Speaker 2: There are commonalities.
[5:52] Speaker 2: But in that report, we did also talk about this kind of urbanization that was happening beyond the formal boundaries of cities, and in a sense of how to deal with this messy urbanization that was occurring, both in terms of the economics of that, but also thinking of okay, housing land development on the prairie of cities in South Asia.
[6:31] Speaker 2: So I think that's common.
[6:33] Speaker 2: One thing going back to the 2016 report for South Asia, even though it's quite striking in a sense, because at time I think this is still largely true.
[6:44] Speaker 2: Urban population growth is very rapid.
[6:48] Speaker 2: But that doesn't necessarily mean that urbanization countries defined as the share of the population that lives in urban areas is increasing rapidly.
[7:00] Speaker 2: Several South Asian countries, of course, it is, but urban share of the population has only actually been quite slowly.
[7:09] Speaker 2: So that's an interesting sort of difference in Indonesia.
[7:14] Speaker 2: There are big contrasts, I think, between kind of the models or patterns of urbanization and East Asia extent, and those in those in South Asia, those in Africa, of course, East Asia has been tremendously in many respects in terms of this very strong correlation.
[7:35] Speaker 2: Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation between and economic growth, the increase in GDP per capita.
[7:45] Speaker: One thing that immediately stuck out to me as I read the report in this kind of right in chapter one is East Africa, which is where the Africa Urban Lab is based, and I'm not claiming credit for this whatsoever, but East Africa is repeatedly up in chapter one as this kind of bright spot, right?
[8:05] Speaker: By my count from the report, there are four or five big in the way it seems East African urbanization is unfolding to the other regions in the continent.
[8:16] Speaker: And I want to dig into these a bit.
[8:18] Speaker: So first, it's the only part of Africa where inmigration rural to urban areas is a serious driver of urban growth.
[8:27] Speaker: I think something like 31% of urban growth over 2020 to 2025 is from inmigration in East Africa.
[8:36] Speaker: And that's more than double any other of the subregions on the continent.
[8:40] Speaker: So that's huge, number one.
[8:42] Speaker: Second, East Africa has, I think, by far the largest share of its urban population in peripheries and towns rather than in cities.
[8:51] Speaker: Like it's 42% in peripheries and towns.
[8:53] Speaker: Whereas the other subregions, I think it's between 22 of urbanites in their peripheries and towns, so less.
[9:01] Speaker: Which I guess that the implication of this is there's just less urban primacy in East Africa, you could say.
[9:55] Speaker 2: First of all, I'm very impressed by your account of some of the main findings from Charts and Bowen.
[10:00] Speaker 2: It's very nice.
[10:01] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fascinating.
[10:02] Speaker 2: I'm not going to pretend I've got the answers to that I think maybe you're just as knowledgeable as I am in many When it comes to this, maybe a few caveats are worth in mind.
[10:17] Speaker 2: Again, as you say, for example, it is the case that since for the East African countries, we have seen this relatively strong between urbanization, between increasing GDP per capita.
[10:31] Speaker 2: But it's not only in East Africa, as you mentioned, it's also in Western Africa.
[10:36] Speaker 2: That is interesting because it does change this kind of narrative that it's only urbanization without growth.
[10:44] Speaker 2: That's not been the case.
[10:46] Speaker 2: That's been more the case in southern Africa, more the case in Central Africa over the last decade or so.
[10:52] Speaker 2: I think it is also worth remembering that the kind of East cities, at least at the beginning of the sample period, at like a very low base in many ways.
[11:04] Speaker 2: So a GDP per capita, I think in Eastern Africa, definitely to Southern Africa because of South Africa, or the also other parts of the region.
[11:15] Speaker 2: So there's this kind of natural catch-up possibility for growth, the kind of solo swarm neoclassical growth model in terms of the potential to be able to grow faster.
[11:27] Speaker 2: Because East Africa is a very diverse region itself in terms of the countries in the region.
[11:34] Speaker 2: So it's not like one uniform story.
[11:36] Speaker 2: But nevertheless, I think under report, although we don't try to provide like a causal explanation for this patterns of performance that seem to be there in the data.
[11:51] Speaker 2: We do discuss quite a lot kind of examples from countries in the region, which I think resonates quite well with some of the reports' main policy recommendations.
[12:01] Speaker 2: So I think Ethiopia is a good example of that.
[12:07] Speaker 2: We know that in Ethiopia the government has placed an emphasis in terms of its 10-year development plan in terms of urban development.
[12:18] Speaker 2: It gets quite a lot of attention in the development plan Ethiopia.
[12:24] Speaker 2: And then thinking about this kind of cities, peripheries, distinction that we make in the report, that's quite that Addis, for example, is one of the very few cities of South Africa in Sub-Saharan Africa that's been able contractual sub-national borrowing and so being able to the capital markets.
[12:48] Speaker 2: And part of the reason further is that Addis does have a lot of fiscal autonomy compared to many cities, and that in turn partly reflects it's got like a special status within as more of two chartered cities.
[13:08] Speaker 2: And that's something that we do talk about in Durapat.
[13:12] Speaker 2: This idea that, okay, for cities, governments to be effective, they've got to have the authority to be able to be effective and to be able to implement policies and undertake And this kind of special jurisdiction decentralization that we talk about in Durapart, Addis has elements of Also, the the government has been willing to facilitate or at least not stand in the way of the subnational borrowing.
[13:42] Speaker 2: So I think at the level of cities, that that's one very thing in Ethiopia.
[13:48] Speaker 2: Also, in both Ethiopia and several other Eastern African we talked about the peripheries and kind of the kind of planning ahead for an expansion.
[14:00] Speaker 2: That's something that Ethiopia has been quite actively I think even going back to 2013, there was this joint of Ethiopia NYU initiative in terms of expansion the cities and very stripped-back approach to planning you lay out the arterial grid, and then you try to allow for the pillowing and subdivision of lands within the defined by the grid, and that allows you to undertake kind of the urban expansion in a more orderly manner.
[14:37] Speaker 2: And then, of course, there's the industrial parks program Ethiopia, sticking with Ethiopia, and that that's been quite successful.
[14:46] Speaker 2: It's also been interesting that there do seem to be of efforts to maybe bundle industrial park development with urban development, which is something that you see in Asia to an extent.
[15:01] Speaker 2: So those are Ethiopian examples, but we do, as I said, see of this urban expansion planning in other countries in East Africa.
[15:11] Speaker 2: And then, for example, in Rwanda, going back to cities, they do have the Kagali Master Plan for 2050, which resonates in many ways with some of the recommendations of the report cities, trying to connect workers to job rich clusters and replying for transit-oriented development, a kinds of examples from countries in the region.
[15:39] Speaker: Yeah, I think that's right.
[15:41] Speaker: And I was, as I was reading chapter one, and East Africa kept coming up as this bright spot, it got me thinking, like, what could be describing it?
[15:50] Speaker: Some additional thoughts I had.
[15:51] Speaker: One of them is that Rwanda and Ethiopia have been two of the growing countries on the planet over the time period.
[15:58] Speaker: And so that could recent conflict notwithstanding, that could be driving some of the impact.
[16:03] Speaker: East Africa is also proximate to a couple other very dynamic regions.
[16:08] Speaker: So the Gulf obviously has grown substantially over the last decades, as has India, right?
[16:14] Speaker: And there's obviously in in many East African countries, large kind of business communities of Indian entrepreneurs ties to India that could also be contributing in some small And then the more, yeah, obviously you don't have to respond this, but the more hand-wavy theory that I had, and totally conjectural from my travels and readings, but one of the things that I've been thinking about is I see oftentimes more observations of jurisdictional competition in East compared to other regions.
[16:47] Speaker: And I was trying to figure out why that might be the case.
[16:49] Speaker: And it strikes me one reason could be that the countries, states within East Africa are relatively balanced compared to some of the other regions.
[16:59] Speaker: So you have somewhat similarly sized, both in population in economic activity between Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, is a little larger, but it's a little lower in per capita than the other three.
[17:13] Speaker: So these are like large-ish states that are relatively balanced.
[17:16] Speaker: And so they might have stronger interjurisdictional and there might be some emulation that results from that, more quickly diffuses successful policies and whatnot.
[17:28] Speaker: Whereas in some other subregions like West Africa, sort of dominant state is by far Nigeria.
[17:35] Speaker: It is massive compared to any other of the states in West And similarly in Southern Africa, sort of South Africa really dominates, right?
[17:44] Speaker: So again, this is a very kind of political science-y thinking, but those were some of my some of my thoughts.
[17:52] Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that that's great actually.
[17:54] Speaker 2: And so you can't tell your political science background.
[17:57] Speaker 2: First of all, it's part of that.
[17:59] Speaker 2: I I guess, first of all, to acknowledge, as you said, part of this kind of good performance is going to be at the level and kind of factors a country fixed effect that benefits all cities potentially, like Ethiopia, said Rwanda growing quickly, and then that carries over to the cities.
[18:17] Speaker 2: And there is like a symbiotic relationship, of course, kind of performance at the national level and performance the individual open level.
[18:26] Speaker 2: But I do like this idea of like the demonstration type The fact that okay, maybe it's not just the size, but kind of the balance in terms of the economic and population weights of the countries that surround you, in a sense, that might some effect.
[18:43] Speaker 2: I think that would be quite interesting topic of the research.
[18:48] Speaker 2: Of course, some African countries are quite small.
[18:53] Speaker 2: I think that does make it harder because then, in terms of scale effects, you're really reliant upon regional and also in terms of pretty much dependence on getting like expert sector going to be able to experience growth as well.
[19:10] Speaker: Okay, so back to the report, right?
[19:11] Speaker: We have chapters dedicated to each of the different urban types that you've outlined.
[19:16] Speaker: One on cities, one on urban peripheries, one on smaller towns.
[19:21] Speaker: So just maybe first on cities, and these are uh these are urban agglomerations of over 50,000 people 1,500 per people per kilometer squared in cities.
[19:36] Speaker: So one fact from this chapter that to me summarized the with cities on the continent is that in Nairobi, the 69% of people get to work by either matatu or by walking on And this group of people can only reach 4% of formal jobs in with a 30-minute commute.
[20:03] Speaker: Right?
[20:04] Speaker: So, to me, again, this gets at all the key challenges touched on in this chapter with cities.
[20:09] Speaker: So the question then is how can city governments and national governments deal with this issue of sort of a disconnected labor market that therefore isn't really one integrated city, but in reality it's a bunch of fragmented little villages that blunts agglomeration economies.
[20:30] Speaker: How can governments get at this?
[20:31] Speaker: And what does this chapter recommend?
[20:34] Speaker 2: You're right.
[20:34] Speaker 2: I guess we diagnosed two things in the chapter.
[20:50] Speaker 2: So what's particularly notable, first of all, in terms of kind of spatial structure of cities in the region overall, as the average picture, is that idea jobs are dispersed the entire city extent.
[21:05] Speaker 2: So most of those jobs are informal jobs, of course.
[21:08] Speaker 2: Most of them are with small enterprises and so forth.
[21:11] Speaker 2: And so, first of all, uh the there's a dearth of formal jobs, and then informal jobs are pretty evenly spread across kind of the urban extents, and really you've got this lack of jobs for clustering in key locations of a city.
[21:27] Speaker 2: I think that there's a paper by Gabriel Alfred, a few other co-authors, and they basically identify these prime in which in cities like London, New York, and so forth, the vast majority of formal jobs are in very few prime within a city, and that that kind of seems to be largely Of course, there are some clusters, but not clustering to the same extent of these kinds of formal jobs that we see in even.
[21:59] Speaker 2: Latin American and the Caribbean in South Asian cities and forth.
[22:04] Speaker 2: So that that's the first stylized fact, empirical fact that we find.
[22:09] Speaker 2: And then secondly, not only do you lack these jobs-rich in kind of key locations of a city, but then to the extent you do have jobs clusters, it's just basically very to get to them for workers.
[22:24] Speaker 2: And those two things combined, we've learned the ability realize agglomeration economies at a citywide level you've got very fragmented urban structure in many And so in that chapter, we do talk about okay, how can we can policymakers try to improve that?
[22:46] Speaker 2: What kind of policies might be needed?
[22:48] Speaker 2: And so we do talk about a pre-part policy framework in that chapter.
[22:53] Speaker 2: And so the first part is okay, first of all, how do you these job-rich clusters of formal firms in key locations of a city?
[23:03] Speaker 2: And something we talk about there is really, I guess there's been a tendency to spread investment throughout a overall.
[23:14] Speaker 2: And then the second part of the kind of policy framework is precisely how do you then, once you've got the jobs-rich or the beginning to incubate, how to better connect and housing to those jobs-rich locations.
[24:00] Speaker 2: And that's partly about public transport as well, and out the public transport network.
[24:07] Speaker 2: But of course, in most cities in the region, transport is overwhelmingly informal, and particularly if you want to move quickly in the short term, you've got to think about do you incorporate sorts of informal transportation with transportation to create better mobility within a city and types of reforms can you undertake to be able to encourage And then the last part of the kind of policy framework for one is of course, if you're going to invest in you've got to have money.
[24:40] Speaker 2: And to be able to do that at the city level, you need to be able to, okay, you're partly reliant on transfers, reliant in many cases on transfers from central government, but you also want to be able to build your own source particularly if you want to move beyond central government and central government resources are restricted, if you to be able to encourage these types of investments in a much larger number of cities.
[25:13] Speaker: Yeah, and I'd add on your last point that timing is there's no better timing to start to really think hard and invest in own source revenue because in in 2025 there were significant to a lot of these African governments, these go to national And I would presume that we're gonna see, therefore, sort of effects, and that'll affect kind of the amount that are from central governments to local governments.
[25:39] Speaker: And if that, to your point, makes up an overwhelming amount of city budgets, I think it's on average 75 to 85 percent, on the country.
[25:46] Speaker: That's gonna have an impact.
[25:47] Speaker: And the best thing you might be able to do as a city is put effort, time, energy, resources into raising own revenue.
[25:56] Speaker 2: Absolutely.
[25:56] Speaker 2: I think there are actually some good examples of kind to do that from cities within the region.
[26:03] Speaker 2: I think one example we talk about in the report is Tree and the 2018 property tax reforms, which have been very And we do sell some other examples in the report, including Lagos in the mid-2010s, in terms of successful policies, to actually quite quickly be able to increase the kind of tax revenue, which is most probably the most undertapped of revenues with within the region.
[26:34] Speaker: There's a chapter now on the next urban type, which is So these are areas on the outskirts of cities where are coming into, and therefore these areas are in some very rapidly transitioning from agricultural brownfield land urban-esque land.
[26:53] Speaker: So can you explain?
[26:54] Speaker: There's a sort of two-pronged approach that this over for urban peripheries.
[26:59] Speaker: Can you explain the combination of this arterial road with this bottom-up land subdivision on the peripheries?
[27:08] Speaker: What does the city do?
[27:09] Speaker: What did the landowners do?
[27:11] Speaker: And maybe if you can tell us with some specific examples, that that would be great.
[27:16] Speaker 2: Yeah, no, yeah, I think this goes a little bit back to our of Ethiopia.
[27:20] Speaker 2: Uh yeah, because that's an example of a country and cities this has, I mean, I must also acknowledge this is very much inspired originally by the work of Saudi Angel.
[27:32] Speaker 2: Of course, at the Africa Urban Lab, you've got Patrick Lanson Hall, and you've got the Urban Expansion Program, and there's strong synergies there, and we've been inspired by the work of the lab as well in that respect.
[27:45] Speaker 2: And so this two-pronged approach that we talk about in the is, as you say, it's the first element of it is, as we talked about earlier, that cities are expanding very rapidly in According to our data, our projections, cities will almost in area over the next 25 years.
[28:06] Speaker 2: Projections from other sources who indicate that the might be even more rapid.
[28:12] Speaker 2: So you know that this growth is going to come in built-up And if you do nothing, you're going to get this very messy on the peripheries of cities, and that's going to further fragmented pattern where you've got these expanding cities, which are collections of villages, as you say, and you've not got like humified metropolitan areas.
[28:34] Speaker 2: And so the first kind of prong in that approach is very simple in principle.
[28:41] Speaker 2: You project kind of the expansion that's going to occur in next 20, 30 years, and then you basically mark out the of way for arterial grid of roads, try to protect those of way, start to construct the arterial grid of And the idea there is that basically provides the future structure of the city, future spatial structure.
[29:05] Speaker 2: And then because you've got the rights of way protected, going to allow better accessibility and connectivity the city.
[29:13] Speaker 2: And then the second prong is that okay, within these macro all you want to try to do is facilitate landowners within peripheral areas to be able to peel the land, and then peeled the land, then that allows you to basically some space in terms of, for example, interior roads within blocks, all the types of basic foundational infrastructure you might need, public spaces, and then subdivide the land allocate it back to the owners.
[29:47] Speaker 2: The good thing about this kind of lamp pill and subdivision process is that it raises the value of the land, and so then there's some potential for land value capture to be able to finance some of the infrastructure.
[30:03] Speaker 2: Now, in terms of the question of who does what, I think kind of overall planning level, in terms of okay, planning kind of urban expansion plan for where the grid is going to go, where the rights of way are going to go, making sure you protect environmentally sensitive areas or which you don't want to build.
[30:27] Speaker 2: But then when it comes to the kind of land subdivision, and subdivision process, it's really about okay, empowering the communities and the people who occupy that land to be to undertake that process.
[30:49] Speaker 2: And this laying out of a basic grid and some degree of it's already happening informally in some places in the And it's not like you're potentially just introducing completely alien from scratch.
[31:06] Speaker 2: It's building on a process that's already occurring to extent, but informally in parts of the region.
[31:14] Speaker: Yeah, the the case that struck me was the Somalia, right?
[31:19] Speaker: In Mogadishu, where you it was just observed by some people these landowners started just spontaneously planning and road grids.
[31:28] Speaker: So that that was a fascinating example.
[31:30] Speaker: And I'll just I'm a visual guy, so I if for listeners that at pictures instead of reading very long reports or very papers, I'll refer them to it's called the Atlas of Urban and they have a website, Atlas of Urban Expansion.org.
[31:45] Speaker: And there's actual visual graphics of I think hundreds of from every region of the of the globe on their historical urban expansion patterns.
[31:55] Speaker: And it literally shows the cities grow significantly over a period of time.
[32:00] Speaker: And it's fascinating.
[32:01] Speaker: One more thing I refer listeners to do on this point is phenomenal essay in a magazine called Works in Progress, Redrawing the City, and it's about how Japan post-World War dealt with its rapid urban transition and land readjustment, is part of this chapter, was responsible for something like I want to say, 45% of the urban population was subject to some sort of land readjustment in Japan, which is crazy.
[32:30] Speaker: This is like half of the urban population.
[32:32] Speaker: And as you said, the East Asia urban transition has been one the most rapid, but also the most well-managed urban in terms of translating into economic growth and structural that we've seen.
[32:44] Speaker: So this could be a large part of that contribution.
[32:47] Speaker 2: One of the very first presentations I went to listen to I joined the World Bank was by Soya Inchell, I was on the atlas for urban expansion in the early days.
[32:57] Speaker 2: And of course, banking was so richly inspired by the of Manhattan and the urban expansion plan there in terms the plan to thought ahead in terms of drawing out this grid of roads into which then the expansion occurred.
[33:11] Speaker 2: And like, why is this necessary at the time?
[33:14] Speaker 2: But then my anticipation of growth.
[33:17] Speaker: Yeah.
[33:17] Speaker: And I speaking of Manhattan, I'm actually in Manhattan New York.
[33:21] Speaker: And yesterday, uh obviously I'm in one of the best cities in the world, so I uh took the opportunity to walk around and went to the Museum of the City of New York.
[33:31] Speaker: And you can literally see there are pictures of this process delineating, as you say, the rights of way for this arterial grid in early and mid-19th century Manhattan in advance of the growth of the urban population, which started on the tip of the island and grew northward as the city rapidly grew.
[33:53] Speaker: And it's vast, they're literally carving out rock in mid and in the upper west and upper east sides.
[33:59] Speaker: And you can see that as you walk through Central Park.
[34:01] Speaker: There are huge swaths of rock that's left in the park, but had to carve through that for delineating these road grids.
[34:07] Speaker: Anyways, fascinating pictures, great museum, highly it for those folks who come to New York City to see the history of how this great city was built.
[34:16] Speaker: Okay, so just moving on to towns, right?
[34:19] Speaker: These are the last type, the the last urban type the report at is these smaller towns.
[34:24] Speaker: Now, it would seem to to me if I'm a cast-strapped African that that doesn't have unlimited resources to do towns might be less of a priority for me, right?
[34:37] Speaker: Again, I have a limited budget, I gotta make decisions that budget constraint.
[34:41] Speaker: Necessarily things have to be deprioritized.
[34:43] Speaker: But what are the recommendations from this part of in dealing with urban growth in smaller towns?
[34:52] Speaker 2: These small towns are actually often, I think, overlooked policy discussions.
[34:57] Speaker 2: But then if you look at the data, and thanks to our with actually the European Commission's Trade Research we did do a lot of work to identify these towns and the extents of those towns and look at the growth the towns.
[35:13] Speaker 2: There's actually a remarkable number of them.
[35:16] Speaker 2: I think more than 15,000 we identify in the data.
[35:20] Speaker 2: And these are kind of towns that have a population of more 5,000 people, and the density, I think it's of more than 300 people per square kilometre that defines them as a but not as dense, not as big as the cities that we identify in Durapath.
[35:40] Speaker 2: And these towns are growing very quickly.
[35:43] Speaker 2: Natural population growth is still high in the region, and of that, some of these towns will become cities, just the sense.
[35:54] Speaker 2: And some of the same issues in terms of applying for on the peripheries of existing cities that apply to these And the good news is you've got the opportunity to almost ahead of that urban expansion.
[36:08] Speaker 2: Also, a significant number of people live in these few hundred million, but there is a good portion of the So you've got to think about that.
[36:19] Speaker 2: And as I think we alluded to earlier, the role of urban is surprisingly low throughout the region in many ways.
[36:27] Speaker 2: And people are going to continue to live in these towns.
[36:30] Speaker 2: These towns are going to continue to grow.
[36:32] Speaker 2: So you can't afford to ignore them necessarily.
[36:35] Speaker 2: That being said, we do draw the distinction in the reports as you say, resources aren't infinite.
[36:42] Speaker 2: Governments have to choose priorities, development have to choose priorities and so forth.
[36:48] Speaker 2: And so there is a question where do you put your So we do distinguish between terms that have kind of a potential and terms which have higher economic potential.
[37:02] Speaker 2: Of course, that's difficult to define as a concept, towns that might have higher potential, the towns that good location, underlying locational fundamentals, and they might be along existing transport corridor or a transport or economic corridor that's undergoing heavy investment.
[37:23] Speaker 2: And so they're well positioned along a potential They might have quite a strong natural resource base, they have fertile agricultural ground, they might have relatively favorable climatic agricultural conditions going ahead, that there is the real potential, economic potential, to be able to generate economic growth, plug into value change, take advantage of these big corridor investments.
[37:50] Speaker 2: And so we do argue that okay, you should focus more on these high potential towns.
[37:57] Speaker 2: You don't ignore the low potential towns, of course, but the emphasis more on investments in human capital to be equip the local populations, whereas in the high you might think of more place-based policies.
[38:13] Speaker 2: We try to make the point that with relatively small it might be able to help unlock some of the potential of the huge amounts of investment that's going into major corridors in the region to be able to realize some of the of those corridors as well.
[38:33] Speaker: I think that's right, your last point on the large, huge of investments in these infrastructure corridors.
[38:40] Speaker: The Belton Road is less less heavily invested in now, but it in its zenith in the 2010s, mid mid-2010s.
[38:48] Speaker: And the underlying infrastructure, it doesn't just it pay for itself on its own.
[38:55] Speaker: Oftentimes that infrastructure pays for itself the increase in real estate values created by nodes along that infrastructure, right?
[39:04] Speaker: And so you oftentimes get whole new agglomerations and urban coagulating around the nodes of this newly built that is, uh these these Chinese investments in various along the Belton Road through the time of mid-2010s.
[39:19] Speaker: Again, less less is being invested in now, but there was a period when you saw these nodes form.
[39:26] Speaker: Moving on from towns, one of the aspects of the report that I really liked was this discussion.
[39:32] Speaker: It was in a spotlight in the report, this discussion of the of large urban developers and the role that they have played can play in grappling with really rapid urbanization across the continent, especially given weak local government capacity.
[39:48] Speaker: Can you just go over some examples of this and maybe both and things to like about this approach and then maybe some that have been observed?
[39:59] Speaker 2: It's interesting.
[39:59] Speaker 2: It's something for a long time I don't think we paid attention to.
[40:04] Speaker 2: Sometimes that's been combined, this urban development as with a special economic zone to bring the kind of two sides together, this integrated special economic zone with like development on the peripheries of cities.
[40:59] Speaker 2: I think we visited one example of this on the periphery of Tattoo City, that's been developed.
[41:07] Speaker 2: I think it's about 20 kilometers away from Nairobi, it's 20 square kilometres and it's being developed over time.
[41:16] Speaker 2: But that's just one example there are actually quite a examples from across the region.
[41:23] Speaker 2: And it's not just the sub-Saharan African phenomena, it's bigger of a phenomena in East Asia, we would say.
[41:31] Speaker 2: I guess on the positive side, you do think of the capacity the private sector to be able to bring in international in large-scale urban development and kind of crowding in investment to supplement public finances.
[41:57] Speaker 2: The concerns that you sometimes hear expressed often inclusion, in a sense of some of these cities potentially towards a wealthy elite, to what extent might that be the might not that be the case.
[42:13] Speaker 2: But yeah, I think that's an issue worth exploring.
[42:16] Speaker 2: And sometimes people do worry about like accountability in a sense.
[42:22] Speaker 2: And yeah, I must mention like the work of Martin Rama and in this respect.
[42:46] Speaker 2: They've got quite a big research program on the World Bank, this phenomenon.
[42:50] Speaker 2: So it's not something that's going to go away.
[42:54] Speaker 2: We can't bury our heads in the sand and pretend that this of development isn't occurring.
[42:58] Speaker 2: And so we want to be able to understand it and realize the that go along with it.
[43:05] Speaker: Yeah, and I'll just refer for those interested in this because as Mark has alluded to, this is it's an under-discussed way that urbanization is taking place with heavy involvement these pretty large private urban developers, and therefore it's under-researched.
[43:21] Speaker: But if there are some folks interested in looking into this I do know the new cities map that is a bunch a data set by the Charter Cities Institute, which I was formerly at leading this research when they were assembling it, has been and has some data on some of this.
[43:39] Speaker: Again, it's a nascent effort because it's such a new and field.
[43:43] Speaker: So I think it does need some more researchers and eyes into this phenomenon and how it's unfolded, not just here in Saharan Africa, but also as Mark said, it's a it was a huge part of the response to urbanization in East Asia and Urban transition.
[44:00] Speaker: So very open question here.
[44:02] Speaker: Maybe lastly, Mark, because we went through, chatted a bit about each of the three different types of urban areas discussed in the report in larger cities, in urban peripheries, and smaller towns.
[44:16] Speaker: But then there's also a last chapter that covers more issues of sort of urban governance writ large and urban And this chapter, it's pretty explicit on timing around its So there's this shorter-term levers and longer-term And in the near term, the recommendation from this part of the report is for governments to reform intergovernmental which, as you alluded to earlier in our conversation, form by far the bulk of local government budgets across the somewhere between 75 and 85% on average.
[44:50] Speaker: So that's number one in the short term.
[44:52] Speaker: But also in the short term, more selectively, I think, targeting these governments' limited resources to invest in, you could it the biggest bang for your buck urban areas.
[45:03] Speaker: And then it looks to a longer time horizon, a more or longer-term agenda, is around this property taxation and own source revenue from more land-based financing.
[45:14] Speaker: Why the sequencing?
[45:16] Speaker: What explains these differential timing of these
[45:21] Speaker 2: So I don't think the timing is completely clear-cut in a We've talked, for example, about like the property tax in Freetown, which were able to have the impact quite But the vast majority of funding, financing for local for cities, for towns does come through the transfer from central governments.
[45:44] Speaker 2: And so that's where you can almost have an immediate effect, in a sense, if you're able to improve the sort of transfer system.
[45:56] Speaker 2: And the key problem here is that we've often got, for unpredictability of the flows of transfers from central to local governments.
[46:06] Speaker 2: And you might get large yearly fluctuations, and that makes it very difficult at a local level to be able to plan.
[46:13] Speaker 2: But if you're able to increase that predictability through of a real-space system, which is in place, means in many adhere to that system, then you can almost have an system-wide effect in terms of making more predictable at the review streams that they receive from central which is important for a number of reasons.
[46:35] Speaker 2: Whereas typically to increase NSO's reviews, you don't to delay that agenda, but it's typically an agenda that often takes time to be able to do that because you want to leverage property taxes, but it might be the case that you don't a proper pedestrian or lots of properties that aren't and so forth.
[46:58] Speaker 2: And that's not a problem you're going to solve overnight.
[47:01] Speaker 2: It takes time and effort and reforms and programs.
[47:04] Speaker 2: And we've got good examples from within the region it is a longer term effort as far as use the use of use cost recovery for utilities, for instance, and then of more general land-based financing tools, which capacity in many sense, particularly the most sophisticated of those tools.
[47:28] Speaker 2: And so that's why we argue for okay, we want to have both these agendas, kind of building own source reviews at the level, but then like the national government, if it's able to like improve the working of the intergovernmental transfer it can't immediate system wide affects the benefits all urban areas potentially.
[47:48] Speaker: I think you know you know, Mark, so the Africa Urban Lab, we launched our urban finance program, and part of that is trying to replicate this Freetown-esque success around that 5x revenues within two fiscal years.
[48:02] Speaker: And I think I give huge plaudits and credit to the pioneers this approach.
[48:08] Speaker: Uh, it was in partnership with the Freetown City Council, local partners, and then the international partners were Growth Center, the Lagree, the Local Government Revenue and ICTT, the International Center for Tax and Development, sort of pioneered this approach.
[48:23] Speaker: And one I think you mentioned oftentimes both development partners think that you need to have this fully absolutely 100% complete cadaster before moving forward on tax.
[48:39] Speaker: And I think the one of the reasons the Freetown case was is they said we actually don't need to do a fully built-out, out, 100% complete cadaster to move forward on this and to So they do what's called a property first approach.
[48:54] Speaker: They don't need to have a full cadaster.
[48:56] Speaker: They send a rate demand notice or bill to the property, and it's addressed to the property owner, literally says owner.
[49:05] Speaker: And presumably, if it's not the property owner that receives bill, the tenant doesn't want to pay it.
[49:11] Speaker: So they're gonna read, they're gonna hand it off to whoever bill is due to, and that's the owner.
[49:16] Speaker: So you don't need to fully clarify in advance of implementing this reform who owns what.
[49:22] Speaker: And as I said, kind of 400% or 5x increase in own source revenue within two fiscal years.
[49:28] Speaker: So this is what I liked about this approach is it's right now.
[49:32] Speaker: You don't need a full cadaster in place.
[49:35] Speaker 2: Well, I think that's awesome because the more general that we try to adopt in the report, like what the policies in reports that you can implement today, given the current conditions, that we'll be able to move the needle of uh yeah, I guess historically much of the discussion been around like mainstream-wide decentralization to governance and lead to better outcomes.
[50:00] Speaker 2: And that that's of course very important, but in a sense, more pragmatically, what can we do in the here and now that's feasible to be able to move the needle?
[50:12] Speaker 2: I completely agree that the futile example is a good example of that, and it's a good example that comes from within the region themselves, and there are like many kind of older that we try to cite in the report, and then can we is the for scaling up these approaches?
[50:32] Speaker: Okay, great.
[50:32] Speaker: So we covered many questions on the report, and I ask some other questions because I know you're an urban you've written other research other than this, and I'm about some of this past research.
[50:44] Speaker: And we briefly touched upon this point I want to come back to earlier in the conversation when we discussed East Africa as as this bright spot.
[50:53] Speaker: But right, you you've looked into the this question of the composition of cities and of urban transition and the of this demographic composition.
[51:05] Speaker: So I had a few questions on this.
[51:07] Speaker: So, as the proper urban nerd that I am, I've been reading urban economic history on 19th century city growth in both the UK, your neck of the woods, and in France.
[51:20] Speaker: I guess now France is also your neck of the woods here in Mark.
[51:24] Speaker: I just want to first maybe I'll first put the demographic for you side by side so we have them in our head.
[51:31] Speaker: And then I wanted to tease out the implications of these So Jeffrey Williamson, he's this great economic historian from Harvard who actually just passed away recently.
[51:40] Speaker: He finds that 19th century British city growth, it was roughly half due to in-migration, world to urban migration, and half due to natural increase.
[51:54] Speaker: So just babies being born in these cities.
[51:57] Speaker: So that's the UK, half and half.
[51:59] Speaker: Then in 19th century, French cities they grew almost from in-migration because urban natural increase was nearly right?
[52:09] Speaker: This is under-theorized, by the way.
[52:11] Speaker: There's some essays, but the French fertility rate for some started declining like crazy early in the late 1700s before even began.
[52:21] Speaker: So French cities, 19th century, grew from almost entirely rural to urban migration.
[52:27] Speaker: Now, for the African urban transition, your figures, along with co-authors, Remy Jedweb and I think others, put African urban growth at between, I think it's 73 to 78 percent, you say, due to natural increase to births in these cities, and then in contributing like a paltry 15 to 19 percent across the region.
[52:51] Speaker: So this is almost the complete reverse of 19th century urban transition in terms of city growth due to natural versus in migration.
[53:00] Speaker: So you study this much more in depth than I have.
[53:04] Speaker: What are the implications of this inverse?
[53:08] Speaker 2: Good question.
[53:08] Speaker 2: And just to note, it's not only a strong contrast with like historical kind of urbanization in the UK and France, China's recent history and China's urbanization, I think about 70% driven by migration as opposed to driven by increase.
[53:28] Speaker 2: And so there's also that kind of East Asian Chinese contrast, which is more recent.
[53:33] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
[53:34] Speaker 2: First of all, in terms of causality, of course, there's the causality question.
[53:39] Speaker 2: You do tend to think of okay, pull migration into cities, you would expect pull migration to be stronger, the kind more effective your cities are working in terms of like creation, growth, and providing good and more and better over time.
[53:57] Speaker 2: And that's interesting in East Africa that we see that okay, the contribution of migration is like higher, 30% of growth.
[54:05] Speaker 2: So maybe there's a like pull story going on there, that be part of the reason.
[54:10] Speaker 2: But you know, generally to your question in terms of okay, the implications of this.
[54:17] Speaker 2: If most of your urban population growth is basically increase, and that natural increase is quite a rapid 3%, I think it is per annum, then it does imply that the population of your city is going to be pretty young.
[54:35] Speaker: Yeah, and the dependency ratio very high, right?
[54:38] Speaker 2: Exactly.
[54:38] Speaker 2: And so that that is what we do see in many African cities.
[54:43] Speaker 2: And that's not changing too much, but mortality has also decreasing.
[54:48] Speaker 2: And so the natural rates of increases have stayed steady over the last few decades.
[54:54] Speaker 2: And so, yeah, it does imply, I think, the average age at moment in sub-Saharan Africa in general is 18 years or like that.
[55:04] Speaker 2: And so, as you say, you do get this skewing of the age of your population.
[55:10] Speaker 2: You've got very high, basically, dependency rates because large numbers of children.
[55:16] Speaker 2: And Ramin likes to talk about okay, cities of children is a characterization, just doesn't make the point.
[55:24] Speaker: Yeah, I think the number you guys cite is 41% of these city populations had that that 41% are between zero and 14 old, which is crazy.
[55:35] Speaker: That's a crazy young number.
[55:37] Speaker: Exactly.
[55:38] Speaker: Yeah.
[55:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, and that that does mean just mechanically that if you think of okay, if a large portion of your city population is outside of working age, then that's going to mechanically GDP per capita.
[55:55] Speaker 2: And then you think of other mechanisms through which the dependency rate might be able to affect your productivity as a city.
[56:05] Speaker 2: And yeah, we discussed this in our kind of regional urban economics paper that I've got with Remy.
[56:11] Speaker 2: It is projected that this is going to increase the average age of the populations of South Africa.
[56:18] Speaker 2: So I think by I forget if it's by 2050 or maybe more recently will reach the average age, will be 25.3 years, something that.
[56:29] Speaker 2: And so that does give an opportunity if you consider that in other parts of the world, they've got like very rapidly populations.
[56:40] Speaker 2: And maybe there's a scope in terms of like potential advantage as a result of this.
[56:47] Speaker: That's what I was gonna say next is one of the policy that some African policymakers might draw from this of scares me or at least makes me a little trepidatious, is we need to have less kids and we need to do some population stuff that I think was tried in the 70s-ish.
[57:06] Speaker: And given if we look over to Asia and other parts of Europe, and we see, as you're saying, hugely aging populations and some instances depopulating populations, I don't think the have fewer kids.
[57:24] Speaker: It might be more something like, okay, then maybe we need to out ways how to accommodate in migration more so that we are more working-age populations added to these very And then that makes me think of the work of Mushvik Mubarak no-lean season and removing the frictions between rural to urban migration and what is what are cost-effective interventions to help spur rural to urban migration, rather than reaching for the immediate response, which is let's have less kids, which given what's happening in lots of East Asia, I don't think is the right thing to do.
[57:59] Speaker 2: Yeah, the potential for virtual virtuous circle, uh, if you can improve the capability of your city to provide jobs and access in genetic economic growth, then you in the kind of more migration that kind of helps to to fuel that growth by increasing the labor supply and so Maybe one message is it's important for studying a city and policymakers and international organizations, whoever on a city to be able to understand not just the economic of the city, but the demographic structure of the city, where the city is going in both of those dimensions and have a vision in terms of the future development of the city that then shapes your planning, your economic and so-file for the city.
[58:50] Speaker 2: That that kind of city vision is important.
[58:54] Speaker: Okay, amazing.
[58:54] Speaker: So I'm gonna ask my last question in a second, but before I that, I'm gonna just gonna plug the report one more time.
[59:01] Speaker: It's called Sub Saran Africa's Urban Awakening: Growth and Job Creation.
[59:05] Speaker: It is available publicly on the bank's website.
[59:08] Speaker: So, last question, Mark.
[59:10] Speaker: What are you working on now that this flagship is is launched?
[59:14] Speaker: What's next?
[59:16] Speaker 2: Good question.
[59:16] Speaker 2: So I'm working on its dissemination, first of all.
[59:19] Speaker 2: And so that's like a process.
[59:21] Speaker 2: We hope to do some stuff with you as well, and kurtis is part of that process.
[59:26] Speaker 2: Also working a lot on economic corridors as well.
[59:30] Speaker 2: We've talked about what a big issue there is in terms of through strategy when it comes to economic corridors and ideas of complementary investments that go beyond the trunk infrastructure in terms of investing in the locations along those corridors to be able to unlock the benefits.
[59:50] Speaker 2: So that's one area of focus.
[59:53] Speaker 2: Ironically, having moved from Hanoi to Paris, I am also going to be working increasingly on the kind of major for the East Asia and Pacific region as well.
[1:00:08] Speaker 2: And then more generally, part of my role, and this brings more unpredictability to it, to apply our teams globally in terms of leveraging of urban analytics, bringing insights urban spatial economics, including from academia, to be able to inform thinking about project development.
[1:00:30] Speaker 2: And so that can take any unpredictable ways in terms of different teams across the world.
[1:00:37] Speaker: Mark Roberts, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[1:00:39] Speaker: It was a great conversation.
[1:00:40] Speaker: Appreciate it.
[1:00:41] Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Kursus.
[1:00:42] Speaker 2: It's been a real pleasure.
[1:00:43] Speaker 2: And thank you again for the AUL's involvement with the It's been really appreciated.
[1:00:50] Speaker: No, very much glad to be part of the process and really happy with how it turned out and happy to help on uh dissemination as we launch the report.
[1:00:58] Speaker: So thanks so much, Mark.
[1:01:00] Speaker 1: Okay, thank you, Kursis.
[1:01:00] Speaker 1: Bye.
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