Confab on urbanisation opens in Accra

The World Bank Group has identified well-designed urban policies and strategic investment in Africa as significant tools for making African cities efficient.

That, it said, would make African cities more environmentally sustainable, particularly, the current stage where its urbanisation process had just begun and was evolving. 

A representative of the World Bank Group, Dr Beatrix Allah-Mensah, said urban centres were dynamic systems and policy choices made early in the urbanisation process could have effects for many generations to come. 

Urbanisation conference 

She was speaking in Accra Monday at the opening ceremony of an international conference on urbanisation in Africa.

The two-day conference brought together experts in urbanisation, comprising researchers, practitioners and policy makers worldwide to reflect on the promises and challenges of Africa’s urbanisation.

Participating countries include: Cote d’ Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana.

The theme for the conference is: Urbanisation in Africa: Trends, Promises and Challenges. 

Dr Allah-Mensah said well-designed urban policies and strategic investment had become crucial now because much of urbanisation in Africa was yet to take place considering the fast pace at which the process was evolving.

She said strong regulatory and policy commitments were now needed to lay the foundation for the long-term development of African cities.

“Investment in infrastructure and services are needed to make cities competitive and liveable. Countries will, therefore, need to build institutional and financial systems at all levels, from central to local levels in order to implement city development plans and deliver services efficiently,” Dr Allah-Mensah said. 

Lessons from elsewhere 

The Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Alhaji Collins Dauda, said in a statement read on his behalf that more than half of Ghana’s population currently lived in urban areas.

According to him, an important lesson from the experience of economic development in both the developed and developing countries was that sustained development did not occur without urbanisation.

Alhaji Dauda said Ghana’s urbanisation experience was similar to what the developed countries went through,saying that “Ghana has experienced sustained economic growth along with steady urbanisation during the last decade,” he said

He said in 2012, Ghana launched its National Urban Policy to address some of the challenges of urbanisation and capitalise on previous successes. 

In a speech, read on his behalf, the Minister of Finance, Mr Seth Terkper, said urbanisation was not only a modern phenomenon, but a rapid and a historical transformation of human roots on a global scale, whereby, predominantly rural culture was rapidly replaced by predominantly urban culture.

“Indeed, a critical consideration of development in Africa points to the fact that the African society was rapidly changing from rural to urban, with cities and towns expanding not only in terms of population but also spatially.”

Mr Terkper said cities were taking more space and encroaching on rural agriculturally productive lands with its consequent threat to food and security.