Executive summary
The population of Africa’s cities is growing rapidly. But as poor people cram into towns and cities characterised by limited, weak and often under-resourced infrastructure, they are increasingly relegated to marginal, inadequately serviced, informal settlements and low-cost housing areas, leaving them vulnerable to numerous livelihood, health and security risks.1 The impact of disasters, conflict and climate change is most severe for poor households, especially groups such as poor women and children, as they have the least access to resources to mitigate and recover from disasters. Disasters undo progress in achieving developmental goals, such as gains in education, healthcare and economic progress, and prevent vulnerable women, men and children from being able to claim their rights to basic needs such as food, shelter, work and healthcare. They also erode individual and household resources, undermining livelihoods and the realisation of human rights, which in turn increases vulnerability to disasters of all magnitudes. Climate change is compounding existing risks and creating new ones, placing additional pressure on urban poor people.
As part of its programme on strengthening urban resilience in African cities, ActionAid commissioned research to better understand the risks faced by urban poor people on the African continent. This exploratory research comprised a desktop review of the literature on urban risk in Africa, and fieldwork in three cities in Senegal, The Gambia and Zimbabwe. It examined hazards, vulnerabilities, local capacities, power imbalances and underlying risk drivers to identify strategies for enhancing resilience to disasters, climate change and conflict in Africa’s urban environments.
Key findings:
This research shows that disaster risks in towns and cities are strongly linked to underdevelopment.
Insecure livelihoods; a lack of basic infrastructure and services such as water and waste management; poor urban and land planning; inadequate oversight of urban planning, land-use and building standards; as well as low accountability for the provision of infrastructure and basic services all increase poor people’s exposure to hazards, and vulnerability to their effects. Consequently, reducing risk and building resilience to disasters in urban areas requires tackling the developmental issues that underlie it. This requires improving infrastructure and services, and strengthening livelihoods, all of which are critical in reducing exposure to hazards and enhancing people’s ability to cope with and recover from disasters. It is essential to facilitate and support efforts by governments to reduce risk, while at the same time holding them to account through transparent, responsive and proactive governance structures. It is equally important to involve the private sector, as business and industry often contribute to risk on the continent.
Recommendations:
Reducing risk and building resilience in towns and cities in Africa requires holistic action at the local, regional and national levels. It requires:
Empowering communities to identify, reduce and manage risk. Efforts must focus on engaging communities to identify risks, and working with them to develop technically sound, community-driven and innovative projects, while also empowering them to advocate for change. Interventions should seek to build a sense of community, in which people work together to reduce risk and respond to disasters, and identify and support the most vulnerable people. Risk assessments should seek to understand the extent to which social and other conflict has an impact on access to basic services and needs such as food, water and energy, and how these blockages can be addressed.
Strengthening governments’ capacity to reduce risk, particularly at the local level. Efforts should focus on ensuring that local governments have the financial resources and human and technical capacity to improve service delivery, although this must be paired with mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability for how funding is spent. There should also be an emphasis on promoting integrated, inter-sector risk reduction across government institutions. Where they exist, efforts to enhance government capacity should tap into existing platforms such as the UN’s Making cities resilient campaign.
Strengthening urban planning and regulatory frameworks. This requires identifying and enforcing protective mechanisms, such as by-laws that prevent building and development in hazardous locations, as well as risk-aware building and infrastructure standards. ActionAid can help make these processes more inclusive, using participatory decision-making tools to inform integrated resilience plans that safeguard vulnerable people’s human rights and entitlements. Platforms should also be created for women and girls to inform planning processes, to ensure that planning and implementation are gendersensitive and responds to their needs and priorities.
Facilitating dialogue and collaboration to reduce risk. Efforts to build resilience should facilitate and promote engagement between communities, governmental and non-governmental players, and the private sector. These should bring people together to identify shared challenges and responsibilities, and to get involved in planning and action to reduce risk. This should include building strategic relationships between stakeholders that leverage available capacities and resources to reduce risk.
Non-governmental organisations, UN agencies, civil society and community groups also need to develop strong relationships, and collaborate. ActionAid should work to strengthen, identify and capitalise on intersecting programmes, and engage with government and other key stakeholders at different levels to inform analytical work, policy formulation and implementation.
Focus areas should include working with communities to identify, strengthen and diversify livelihood opportunities, especially for young women and men. Wherever possible, these should explicitly reinforce broader risk reduction goals. An example would be developing opportunities in waste management, recycling or transforming waste materials. Efforts to address access to basic services, urban planning and land management should promote women and children’s needs and safety concerns; this requires working with women and children to identify safety-related barriers to services and how to address these. ActionAid should also incorporate risk reduction and resilience into its existing Safe cities programme, and its Safe schools initiative. It should also link resilience-building to its broader efforts to challenge negative attitudes and values that endanger or disadvantage women.