In anticipation of the Africities summit, Success Afrika’s Mical Imbukwa gets the privilege of talking to Greg Munro all the way from Brussels. Greg is the director of Cities Alliance one of the sponsors of the Africities cities summit. He is born and bred in Africa.
Greg: I am Greg Munro, the director of Cities Alliance which is an organization based in in Brussels but with offices in three countries of Africa. If you wish to know something more about Cities Alliance, we are a partnership of many sectors, including civil society, local government, national governments, multilaterals, academic sector and we have a partnership to fight urban poverty mostly in secondary cities and we were launched as an organization that strives for cities without slums. We were launched in 1999 by Nelson Mandela.
Mical: I understand that you are among the sponsors of the Africities summit that will be coming up in Kisumu in May 2022. So what agenda will you be pushing at the Africities summit?
Greg: The Africities is one of the main events on our calendar and two main things; so one is the whole issue of the secondary cities. Kisumu itself is a secondary city or intermediary city and these are the cities that are still growing and when you could have the most influence over them in terms of growing sustainably with resilience and include all its citizens, the better. So one is about intermediary cities and poverty. That’s always at the forefront of our agenda at any event but especially in Africities because the bulk of our work is in Africa. And then the organizers UCLGA asked us to facilitate what is called tripartite dialogue, where we try and keep discussions going between national governments, local governments and donors to try and align the agendas of national government, local government and the donor community. We align activities on funding around common needs and issues that have been identified together. Those are the main things that we try and push in these kind of events. We try and facilitate them in Africities.
Mical: What are your main initiatives as Cities Alliance?
Greg: We are a partnership to fight urban poverty and we are merely a secretariat here in Brussels but we do a couple of things. We try to work through our members, with our members so that it is a real partnership. We run a series of country programs, so in Liberia, Uganda and in Tunisia we have offices where we have long sustained country programs. And then we have a series of global programs that reach into multiple cities and countries one on gender and about making cities suitable for women and have opportunities for women. We have a few programs on migration. A lot of this is centered around the Horn of Africa and East Africa and because migrants go to secondary cities. The third area is around resilience and building resilience especially in terms of climate change and climate because, many of the urban poor are living in informal settlements. They are the most vulnerable to climate change. They are living on steep banks and steep hills and prone to flooding and so they are the community that contributed the least to climate change but are the ones who are the most vulnerable. And we try and ensure that these global and country programs interlink and work for the same common purpose. Over the years we’ve reached 176 cities in 88 countries.
Mical: One of the reasons as you have mentioned, why Africa needs to focus on these intermediary cities is because most urban poor live there. What other reasons should Africa nations focus on intermediary cities? What opportunities are there?
Greg: So people migrate to urban centers and this migration is getting more and more to the point where by 2050 nearly 70% of the world will live in cities. People migrate for economic reasons, they migrate because of conflict, climate crisis and climate change. When people migrate to the rural areas especially, they migrate first to the intermediary cities. These intermediary cities are the ones that have the population that’s growing the fastest because people who migrate even within the country they go to secondary cities. They are also the cities that are still left to be built as they grow. So you’ve got more opportunity to influence how that city grows. So they grow sustainably; that is the growth that includes all of its citizens, in any including and especially the urban poor are included in the growth of the city and we do a lot of work of city development strategies and how you have inclusivity in a city as it grows sustainably, with resilience and with economic opportunities. But we don’t look at the secondary cities only on their own because they sit between the rural areas and the big primary cities. So, they also function as a link between the rural area and the primary area and very often they are a pathway where goods flow from agricultural rural areas into primary cities. So we do have a territorial approach but the secondary cities are where you could have the most influence in terms of planning the future for sustainable growth of the city and that’s why our focus is on them. Simply put, the opportunities in intermediary cities are; city development strategies, sustainable planning, inclusivity and territorial approach
Mical: One of the major Goals of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to improve accommodation and when that happens, slums are bound to crop up in the intermediary cities. How can intermediary cities ensure growth while at the same time improving the quality of life for the residents?
Greg: Number one, this is the reality and therefore we need to understand that people will migrate into cities and there will be informal settlements because sometimes services don’t keep up. So the first thing is that people have a right to live in the city and firstly from that is issues of land tenure. So we are very opposed to builders going and inflating the informal settlements, that no one wins in that situation. It is about land tenure. And then, if you give people access to land tenure, and then you give them access to microfinance and access to sustainable building material, 80% of the slums are upgraded by the inhabitants themselves. You need to give them an opportunity to do so. And that is what we try and do. And very closely attached to that is the whole issue of basic services. Water, sanitation and roads. And we have many ways that we try to influence this through urban expansion, where you can put up a road system with water and sanitation and allow the informal settlements to develop around that and in that. So to get the basic services, you get opportunities for upgrading of the informal settlements and you have land tenure. That’s what we try and do in informal settlements and slums and begin getting slum upgrading. Obviously of course to that is the whole issue of economic opportunities. So we are doing work at the moment in Uganda, one of the big road developments that is going to go straight through the informal settlements. We have worked with the community and the government and looked at how the community can benefit from that road. But what are the other economic opportunities that the road could bring to that community? It is a holistic approach to slum upgrading but what it’s not, is going and inflating the informal settlements then building houses by the way. That is not what it is.
Mical: Integration is key for development in Africa. In your own opinion, which gaps can African countries fill to boost this integration?
Greg: So I sit in an office in Brussels but I am an African myself. Born and bred. I have spent my whole life working in various forms of development, is that the solutions for Africa lie in Africa itself. And I can give you so many examples. I gave a speech last year on local government and it was to European Northern Hemisphere audience. I said if you want to see the best local government in the world, you go to South Africa. If you want to see the best gender balance in local government, you go to Rwanda. Every single example I gave of excellence was a different country in Africa.
So the first thing we need to do for integration on our development challenges in Africa is to learn from each other. And I think it is also collected effort. You know the boundaries on maps, they were drawn by people long time ago. And sometimes those boundaries divide families, divide communities and we don’t seem to think only about national approach but also the regional approach and to learn regionally, and to create those opportunities to learn from each other. Just today, an email came in from West African government. We certainly knew that there was something in South Africa that we could learn from and could we help to facilitate that? That is what we need to do for integration. That is how we find our solutions.
Mical: What are your expectations from the Africities summit?
Greg: So a lot of people normally attend these summits. The summit normally has two main goals and one is to find shared strategies in order to improve living conditions of local people. The summit is not their just to get support. The ultimate goal of the summit is to improve living conditions of local people in Africa, and we try to find shared strategies at Africities. Then, from that, is that we contribute to the integration and peace and unity of Africa, because we have shared visions, shared strategies and working very much from the bottom up. Working with our communities and then our cities and then we are working all the way up from the local EU area and from our local cities. Those are our expectations and hoping that we can align some of our thinking and strategies across the Africities.
Mical: Your parting shot to the African audience?
Greg: If you look at urbanization in Africa and I will give you another statistic; for every one person that moves to a city in the northern hemisphere, you have 18 people moving into cities in the sub-Saharan Africa. So out of that, urbanization is 18 times higher and this is going to continue. We are going to have secondary cities really explode and we need to work in an integrated fashion to plan ahead. To plan for the people who are going to move into cities, so that they have economic opportunities, they have social inclusion, and they are part of the fabric of the city. Together, if we do that and get inclusivity, we can grow some very vibrant social economic centers in cities in Africa.
