more equitable ways of engendering benefits from large-scale infrastructure, service provision and development choices. Organizations such as the African Development Bank are typically involved in making investments in large-scale, often regional infrastructures such as roads, rail, energy and water systems. However, these initiatives, while necessary, could be better complemented by linking them to national and local level strategies. Linking top-down driven initiatives to bottom-up priorities requires additional concerted attention, so that regional scale interventions link to local initiatives more cohesively. This necessitates the establishment of partnerships between regional, national and local actors, and decision-makers who manage these efforts.
Sustainable Livelihoods Ensuring sustainable livelihoods is a cornerstone of sustainability, as it is a key component of maintaining social stability. Perhaps the greatest pressure on them is reflected at the household level, where global exogenous changes in the prices of food, water and energy combine with the effects of climate change to render poor African urban households extremely vulnerable. Sustainable, integrated service provision is necessary to ensure that urban household resilience is boosted and that liveability is seen as pivotal to the success of urban transitions to sustainability.177A diversity of local-scale economic activities, which draws on existing modes of formal and informal occupations in a supportive and coordinated manner, is required to improve local level resilience to exogenous factors such as climate change impacts, changes in the global economy, global resource scarcities, or natural and man-made disasters. Realizing development at this scale in Africa has been historically ignored as many development policies were formulated and imposed from outside the continent. Reorientating the support of external institutions will be required to actualize partnerships that bring about local scale diversification of African urban and national economies. Ironically, though perhaps fortunately, the turmoil in the global financial system has increased the willingness of global financial institutions to consider, develop and accept new frameworks for economic growth. A critical opportunity has now emerged in which new, or previously ignored, directions can be considered. There has been a significant change of stance in the International Monetary Fund, in particular, with acknowledgement of the inadequacy of earlier developmental models to maintain global economic sustainability and in ushering lasting development in poor countries. Pluralism in economic growth and the provision of livelihoods are needed if African urban development is to be reoriented towards greater local-scale diversity. It will be
THE STATE OF AFRICAN CITIES 2014
Fostering Innovation Africa is rich in renewable and non-renewable resources, with vast consumer potential emerging from the growth of national economies and cities. Africa also has the potential to produce large amounts of food, as evidenced by the large scale foreign purchasers of agricultural land. The necessary preconditions exist to stimulate new agro-ecological economies of scale, but these potentials have not yet been adequately realized. Boosting the innovation capacity of African cities may open up new avenues of development practice, technological design and implementation. Due to the severity and immediacy of urban challenges, innovative responses are required. Linkages between key knowledge and innovation activities need to be fostered. For example, regional cooperation among African institutions of higher learning, innovation hubs, the private sector and civil society has the potential to unleash bold and relevant innovations. Fostering links between activities in different regions enriches the quality of professionals and graduates. It also stimulates the formation of knowledge networks that can evolve and adopt new configurations. Innovation occurs in networked niches of activities and operations where actors can form varied interrelationships to explore new ideas, opportunities, policymaking and frameworks for business and governance. Innovation requires catalysts and some degree of protection from direct market forces if it is to incubate with some degree of success. This incubation, in different milieus of innovation, supported by networks of actors probing different opportunity spaces and experimenting with different combinations of relationships, is critical for African cities. Firstly, it can play a large role in reorienting often underdiversified economies. Moreover, due to the special nature of African urban challenges, solutions developed on the continent may find markets in other developing world contexts. Lastly, local innovations that lead to the development of new local chains of production are desperately needed to boost employment and incomes in African cities, especially amongst the youth and semi-skilled. Innovations for African cities must be customized to their context of implementation because local contexts are governed by complex realities and interacting interests that can undermine the application of new technologies and
infrastructures, which are not sensitively oriented to these realities and interests. Local scale innovations that can boost small to medium-scale activities in African cities may well be more appropriate than the “grand” innovation models of developed countries that are too expensive and require scarce high skills levels. The possible exceptions are in cities where there is a proliferation of underemployed, or unemployed, skilled workers and professionals such as in Southern and Northern Africa. “Innovation hubs” - such as Konza Techno City, some 60 kilometres southeast of Nairobi in Kenya (see Box 4.1), constitute attempts to establish secondary milieus of innovation that do not develop entirely new or innovative ideas, but link to innovation centres across the globe, and require outsourced assistance with activities. Typically, such developments are not integrated into the fabric of African cities, but are developed as stand-alone add-ons to existing cities. Access to these areas will be tightly controlled, and informality will likely be deterred from taking hold.
53