34 The Future of Water in African Cities
Secondary Cities are Equally at Risk but Even Less Equipped to Manage Complexity Over the next 15 years, 38 percent of urban demographic growth is predicted to occur in cities of under 1 million people. While 35 percent of urban residents in Africa currently live in one of 42 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants, a significant proportion of urban dwellers live in intermediate cities (100,000 to 1 million inhabitants), secondary cities (50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants), and peri-urban areas (see Table 1.4). Cities under 1 million will grow by 38 percent by 2025; they have borne the bulk of the overall urban growth rate for the past decade (59 percent of growth from 2005 to 2010) and are projected to continue to grow rapidly (28 percent of growth from 2010 to 2025). For example, Nakuru, Kenya, and Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, grew at 16.6 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively, between 1990 and 2006 (Standard Bank, 2011). The problems of secondary cities must be addressed as today’s secondary cities might become tomorrow’s megacities. The number of cities with populations of more than 1 million is projected to almost double from 42 in 2010 to 80 in 2025 (see Table 1.4). Thirty-one of Africa’s current secondary cities will turn into cities with over 1 million residents over the next 15 years. The institutional, technological, and investment decisions those cities make today will impact their ability to cope with these new challenges. There has been a tendency to focus investments in water and sanitation in capital cities. National utilities tend to privilege capital cities, leaving secondary cities underfunded, understaffed, and sometimes without functioning facilities altogether. Important regional disparities persist in rural access to drinking water, with sizeable gaps between the best and least served. Public expenditure often goes to where it is most easily spent instead of where it is most urgently needed, and often to where the politically powerful reside (van Ginneken et al., 2012). High rates of population growth; large vulnerability to pollution; more competition for surface and groundwater sources; and less financial, managerial, and political capital to address the issues make secondary cities even more vulnerable to water-related challenges. The case of the Ugandan city of Masindi (Eckart et al., 2011) highlights the fragility of high-growth secondary cities with a single water supply source. Urban expansion combined with high economic growth (linked with the recent discovery of oil) will exacerbate water quality issues in the lake supplying all of Masindi’s water. Under current management practice, water quality