Cities key to sustaining Africa’s growth – ARNOLD MEYER

Africa is abuzz. Good governance and democracy are taking root, backed by an increasingly literate and aspiring population. Policy reforms over the last 20 years are generating good results, with Africa recording an average of over 5 per cent GDP growth over the past 10 years.

Investor sentiment towards the continent is turning and riding on this. Foreign direct investment on the rise. Africa’s ability to consolidate development gains and make its economy more efficient is key to sustaining these trends. The focal points for translating these goals into action will be Africa’s administrative and economic hubs — its cities.

Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg are currently top among investors focused on Anglophone Africa. Infrastructure bottlenecks, however, remain major hindrances in Nairobi and Lagos. Can the two cities overcome these challenges?

Kenya is currently undertaking remarkable improvements in its capital’s infrastructure, but with the city’s exponential growth, only a fundamental shift in urban development will lead to a decisive turnaround.

Designed in the 1960s to host a population of only 300,000, Nairobi’s population today is 3.3 million. This is projected to overshoot 5 million by 2020, catapulting Nairobi to the 73rd largest city in the world, from its current position of 117.

Kenya’s proposed development of satellite cities to form the Greater Nairobi Metropolitan Area as part of Vision 2030 is a promising point of departure for new thinking around our cities. It opens the ground for conversations on the role of the private sector in urban development.

Tatu City, which will be the first privately developed city in Africa, is a good test case. Investors are injecting Sh240 billion to build a new satellite city 15 kilometres north of Nairobi’s CBD, which, on completion, will house 62,000 residents and welcome 23,000 visitors daily.

The city will provide an integrated work, play, live urban environment, serviced with world-class infrastructure.

The project is an example of the value of harnessing private resources to build public facilities. After purchasing 2,500 acres of agricultural land, a private entity, Tatu City Ltd, master-planned the infrastructure. It will then build the core infrastructure to create a well-serviced urban environment.

In line with global trends, where satellite cities interlinked with existing cities are developed to absorb the growing pressures of rapid urbanisation, Tatu City is located only 15 kilometres from Nairobi.

It is in the government’s oversight and regulatory role that the private sector meets the public sector to ensure that such investments reflect and enable the spirit of government policy.

In this respect, Tatu City has been designed to not only go beyond meeting all regulatory requirements, but also set the bar for blending environmental sustainability with development.

As an example, over 40 per cent of the land on which Tatu City is to be built is protected to ensure the indigenous fauna and flora is conserved for environmental and aesthetic purposes.