- Africa Must Turn Rapid Urban Growth into Jobs Before Window Closes – World Bank
Sub-Saharan Africa must urgently redesign how it plans, governs and finances its cities if rapid urbanisation is to generate the millions of productive jobs required by its expanding youth population, a new World Bank report has warned.
The region is projected to add 748 million urban residents between 2025 and 2050, taking its total urban population to about 1.7 billion. Its urban built-up area is also expected to almost double over the period.
That demographic transformation could become one of Africa’s strongest engines of productivity, private investment and employment. But it could equally deepen congestion, informality, unemployment and infrastructure deficits if governments continue allowing urban areas to expand without adequate planning.
The World Bank’s Sub-Saharan Africa’s Urban Awakening: Catalyzing Economic Growth and Job Creation argues that the region has entered the final and most decisive phase of its urban transition.
Between 1950 and 2025, Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population increased by 742 million. The region is now expected to add slightly more people to its cities and towns over the next 25 years than it did during the previous 75 years.
By 2050, the Bank says, Sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanisation process will be almost complete. This means decisions taken now about roads, land, transport, housing, local government finance and the location of businesses could shape economic performance for generations.
About 15 million young people enter the region’s labour market every year. Africa must therefore create roughly 15 million additional jobs annually merely to prevent unemployment and economic exclusion from worsening.
Historically, urbanisation has supported structural transformation by bringing workers, firms, infrastructure and markets closer together. Concentration allows companies to find employees and customers more easily, lowers transport costs and encourages innovation.
In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, however, urban population growth has not produced comparable gains in productivity and formal employment.
Average GDP per capita has remained around US$4,400, while a large share of urban employment remains informal, insecure and poorly paid. The central challenge is therefore not simply that African cities are growing, but that they are not converting their size into sufficient economic value.
The report divides the urban system into three distinct spaces: established cities, their rapidly expanding peripheries and more than 15,000 towns. Each faces a different problem and requires a different policy response.
Sub-Saharan African cities housed about 503 million people in 2025. They are projected to add another 320 million residents by 2050, including 218 million people within their existing boundaries.
Urban households generally record higher nominal and real expenditure per adult than equally educated rural households, suggesting that cities still offer better earning opportunities.
However, the economic performance of African cities remains considerably weaker than that of comparable cities in other developing regions.
The World Bank attributes part of the underperformance to the limited number of accessible, job-rich clusters. Economic activity is often scattered across cities, while unreliable transport, inadequate roads and restrictive land regulations make it difficult for workers to reach productive employment centres.
A city may contain firms and workers, but it loses much of its economic advantage if long commutes, congestion and high housing costs prevent the two from connecting efficiently.
The Bank recommends that governments stop spreading urban investment too thinly and instead concentrate integrated infrastructure packages in carefully selected locations with strong economic potential.
These investments should combine roads, reliable utilities, digital connectivity and commercial infrastructure capable of attracting businesses and private capital.
Mass public transport should form the backbone of longer-term urban mobility plans. In the short term, governments should improve coordination between formal and informal transport providers rather than attempting to eliminate informal systems on which millions of residents depend.
Housing policy must also be connected to job creation. Affordable housing located far from employment centres may reduce construction costs but impose heavy transport and time costs on workers.
The report consequently recommends well-located affordable housing and the relaxation of excessively restrictive building-height limits and floor-area ratios. Allowing more vertical development in high-demand locations could increase housing supply and bring workers closer to employment.
The urban peripheries surrounding Sub-Saharan Africa’s cities currently accommodate about 165 million people.
These areas are expected to absorb a significant proportion of future population growth as the physical area of cities expands by approximately 90.00% between 2025 and 2050.
This is where the report sees both the greatest danger and one of the strongest opportunities.
Urban expansion has frequently occurred through informal and fragmented land subdivision. Houses and businesses are developed before authorities reserve space for major roads, drainage systems, schools, healthcare facilities and public utilities.
Once construction becomes entrenched, acquiring land for infrastructure becomes more expensive, politically difficult and socially disruptive.
The World Bank argues that African governments must act before settlement patterns become permanent.
Its central recommendation is the early establishment of arterial road grids that define the future structure of expanding cities. Authorities do not necessarily need to construct every road immediately, but they must reserve the corridors before land is fully occupied.
Governments should then introduce regulatory reforms that allow private landowners and developers to pool and subdivide land within the blocks created by the arterial grid. This would make it easier to provide interior roads and other infrastructure without forcing the state to finance every element of urban expansion.
City peripheries could also host carefully designed public-private developments combining housing, commercial activity and special economic zones.
However, such projects must be integrated into wider transport and land-use systems. Isolated satellite cities and industrial parks may fail if workers cannot access them or if companies remain disconnected from suppliers, ports and consumer markets.
Sub-Saharan Africa has 15,162 towns, many of which retain both rural and urban characteristics.
The report finds that average household expenditure per adult in towns across 13 studied countries is lower than in rural areas, even after considering differences in living costs.
This challenges the assumption that every settlement automatically becomes more prosperous as it urbanises.
Small towns often lack the population, infrastructure and commercial activity needed to generate strong productivity gains. Yet some possess important geographical advantages, particularly those located along transport corridors, near borders, tourism centres, agricultural zones or larger urban markets.
The World Bank recommends a selective approach.
High-potential towns should receive coordinated packages of roads, services, land planning and business infrastructure designed to unlock their geographical advantages. Clusters of promising towns along strategic transport corridors should be prioritised to maximise economic impact within limited public budgets.
Such towns may also need to be administratively reclassified from rural to urban areas, giving them access to governance, planning and financing instruments suited to their growth.
For towns with weak economic prospects, governments should concentrate on education, healthcare and connectivity. The objective should be to equip residents to participate in stronger labour markets rather than attempting to transform every town into an industrial centre.
This recommendation carries political difficulty. Governments frequently distribute projects across numerous districts to demonstrate geographical balance. The report argues, however, that spreading limited capital across too many locations can leave every project underfunded and generate little employment.
Infrastructure recommendations will have limited impact unless local authorities possess the power, professional capacity and predictable financing required to implement them.
Many African cities depend heavily on central-government transfers that may be uncertain, delayed or distributed through opaque formulas. This makes long-term planning difficult and reduces the ability of local governments to borrow responsibly.
Unpredictable transfers can also make cities effectively unbankable because lenders cannot identify a reliable revenue stream against which debt can be serviced.
The report recommends simpler and more transparent transfer formulas, strict compliance with allocation rules and stronger accountability for the use of funds.
African cities must also improve their own revenue mobilisation, particularly through property taxation.
The World Bank estimates that raising property-tax collection across Sub-Saharan Africa to only one-quarter of Western levels could generate about US$15 billion annually.
The potential is especially relevant to Ghana, where local governments collected an estimated US$3 per person in property taxes based on mid-2010s data cited by the report. The corresponding figure was US$6 in Kampala and only US$0.38 among Tanzanian urban councils, compared with US$42 in Nairobi County.
Governments can strengthen collection through geographic information system-based property mapping, digitised billing, simplified valuation systems and more accurate ownership records.
Land leasing, betterment levies, development charges and realistic user fees could provide additional revenue. These tools allow cities to capture part of the increase in land values created by public infrastructure.
The deeper principle is that urban development should generate some of the resources required to finance itself. A new road or transit station often increases surrounding property values. Without suitable mechanisms, that public investment may create private windfalls while leaving the city without funds to maintain infrastructure.
For Ghana, the report’s message is that urban policy must be treated as a central part of economic and employment strategy, rather than merely a matter of physical planning.
Infrastructure should be assessed by the number of productive jobs and private investments it can unlock. Housing policy should consider access to work, not simply the number of units constructed. Local government reform should provide assemblies with predictable resources and stronger revenue systems.
The country must also plan the expansion of urban peripheries before informal development makes future roads, drainage and public services prohibitively expensive.
Most importantly, governments must resist the pressure to distribute scarce infrastructure spending evenly across every location. Equity remains important, but identical investment in places with fundamentally different economic prospects may produce neither fairness nor growth.
Africa’s urban population will continue expanding whether governments prepare for it or not. The policy choice is whether that expansion produces connected cities where firms invest and workers find better jobs, or fragmented settlements characterised by congestion, informality and costly infrastructure deficits.
The World Bank’s warning is that the opportunity is substantial but time-bound. Once land is occupied, roads omitted and settlement patterns fixed, correcting urban mistakes becomes vastly more expensive.
The continent’s urban future is therefore being built now. Whether it becomes an engine of economic transformation will depend less on the number of people moving into cities than on whether governments can connect those people to productive jobs.
