World Bank Urban Services to the Poor-Country Assessment Report: Africa

Country Assessment: Africa

Urban Upgrading in Africa: A Summary of Rapid Assessments in Ten Countries

In the World Bank’s first decade of urban sector lending (1972-1982), one of the primary areas of intervention was the provision and improvement of housing for the urban poor. During these early years, the urban sector at the Bank supported discrete projects with an emphasis on affordability, cost recovery and replicability. In contrast to the era of slum clearance by national governments in the 1960s, the rise of the influential self-help paradigm in housing projects during the 1970s and 1980s was based on two types of approaches: the provision of sites and services, and in-situ slum upgrading. During this time, the Bank financed 50 urban sector loans in 35 countries, with sites and services and in-situ upgrading absorbing almost 60 percent of its allocations.

By the mid-1980s, this particular project approach to housing and urban development had met with serious criticism from both within and outside of the Bank. At the micro-level, criticism was leveled at the inefficiencies created by individual projects. Such critiques included: slow rates of implementation and a record of poor administration; inadequate levels of community participation; inappropriately high building standards and regulations making projects very expensive and hard to replicate; overly complex integrated projects which took a multi-sectoral approach to infrastructure while also seeking to address land tenure; a poor record on cost recovery and operations and maintenance; the problems in upgrading individual neighborhoods that did not connect to citywide networks. At the macro-level, critiques centered on the lack of an overarching institutional framework and the concomitant need for a programmatic approach to urban lending. Such macro critiques led to a wave of policy prescriptions in the late 1980s and the 1990s which focused instead on establishing efficient property markets, setting appropriate regulations and standards, decentralizing authority to local governments, and building local capacity. While some lessons from the micro critiques were incorporated into subsequent urban upgrading projects, the weight of the macro critiques caused a substantial shift to a new generation of urban operations focused on programmatic lending and citywide development strategies with a long-term perspective.

Ghana

Yet evaluations of past upgrading projects are not entirely negative. Many studies found that this first generation of urban projects had a significant impact on the housing stock and the lives of the urban poor. While upgrading projects did face many problems of the kind outlined earlier, they can hardly have been deemed a failure.

It is time to rethink the past experience with upgrading. One of the next challenges for urban policy makers will be to integrate a project approach to planning at the neighborhood scale with the supply-side local government and institutional framework of the 1990s. Both approaches will need to be brought together, reviving many of the original intentions that lay behind upgrading projects all the while emphasizing the importance of institutional capacity building. The past experience with upgrading offers many lessons critical to this endeavor. Urban upgrading was a targeted intervention to improve living standards and reduce poverty. A better understanding of its systematic impacts will aid in the design of new projects that aim to better target service delivery to the urban poor.

While a great deal of evaluation research has been conducted in Latin America and Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa has received much less attention. As such, some lingering questions particular to the region remain. What worked in upgrading projects in Africa and why? Who benefited? Moreover, while the Bank shifted its primary urban focus from upgrading to strengthening local governments, many other donors and national governments continued to prepare upgrading projects in Africa. What lessons do these projects have to offer? How can we apply the micro critiques of the past to rethinking the role of neighborhood projects today and identifying the triggers for going to scale? Taking stock of both the positive and negative lessons learnt in the past decades of upgrading projects is a first step in this direction.

This report is structured as follows. Following this introduction, the second section lays out the two broad goals of upgrading projects in Africa. Section three examines the policy approaches adopted by African governments towards upgrading. Subsequent sections describe the successes, failures, obstacles and constraints encountered during project design and implementation. Sections four through seven group the main issues as social, physical, financial and institutional respectively. The paper concludes with a brief description of future directions for this Norwegian Trust Fund (NTF) research project.

Full Report: Urban Upgrading in Africa: A Summary of Rapid Assessments in Ten Countries

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Mali
Namibia

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