Sub-Saharan African urban growth

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The region where the largest share of this century's additional urban population is projected to arrive, and where the physical and fiscal capacity to receive it is thinnest. Three of the seven countries expected to add most of the world's new city dwellers to 2050 — Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia — are here. The distinguishing feature is not the growth rate, which parts of Asia matched in the twentieth century, but the sequence: in the historic European and East Asian cases, industrial employment and municipal revenue arrived roughly together with the people, whereas across much of this region urban population growth has run ahead of both formal employment and municipal fiscal capacity. UN-Habitat reports that about 62 per cent of urban dwellings in Africa are informal. Tenure documentation is thinner still: SDG indicator 1.4.2 reporting gives roughly 15 per cent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa holding legally recognised documentation of their land rights. Those two figures, taken together, describe cities being built by their residents faster than any authority is recording, servicing or taxing them.