According to the UN Population Division, sub-Saharan Africa’s annual urban growth rate is 3.6%, almost double the world average. About 40% of Africa’s more than 1 billion people live in cities and towns, many having migrated from rural areas to escape poverty, drought or conflict. About 200 million people live in slums.
“Africa is urbanizing faster than any other continent, so much so that by 2030, it will cease to be a rural continent,” said Anna Tibaijuka, executive director of UN-Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements. “Despite this, few African leaders are taking the issue seriously.” African governments have done little to manage rapid urbanization and don’t formally recognize slums.
Slums are not provided with public services, like electricity, sewerage systems, waste management, roads, housing and access to health care or education. And more than a quarter of Africa’s slum dwellers don’t have access to safe drinking water, according to the UN Environment Programme. A whopping 175 million people don’t have what’s considered reasonable sanitation.
That’s not going to change soon because Africa’s annual spending on infrastructure is 45 billion dollars, African Development Bank statistics showed, while almost twice that amount is needed to address the biggest problems.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest city, Lagos, Nigeria, is a prime example of poor planning. The city of 11 million people, two-thirds of whom are slum dwellers, is infamous for its overcrowding, potholed streets, traffic jams, frequent power cuts and poor sanitation. “Lagos has fewer infrastructures than any of the other largest cities in the world,” Lagos Town Planning and Urbanization Commissioner Francisco Abosede told the UN news service IRIN.
As the population of Lagos grows by 8% every year, the slums and their associated problems are growing with it, fuelling crime and increasing social tensions.
The situation is not much different in Africa’s largest slum, Kibera, on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. The city’s slums have become “an urban time bomb,” said James Njuguna, project officer at the Irish non-profit organization Concern International in Nairobi.
Kibera’s estimated 2 million people are a huge underclass with serious consequences for Nairobi’s security and social fabric, Njuguna warned. Frustrated young people often join violent criminal gangs. “The standard of living in the slums is constantly deteriorating,” Njuguna said. “We see rising school dropout rates, poverty, malnutrition and crime. There are no social services. “Unless governments make major political changes, cities like Nairobi might explode with social unrest.”
That’s also true of South Africa. A quarter of South Africans are unemployed, and huge numbers of jobless have been migrating to Johannesburg and Cape Town, the country’s two major cities.
“Government has been struggling to cope with the huge influx of people, to solve infrastructure problems and provide services,” said Thuthukani Ndebele, a researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg. “People feel abandoned.” For a South African slum dweller, hope turns first into frustration and then into anger. They believe they have rights.