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Yes in My Bamako Yard
Over the next 25 years, Africa is expected to add 900 million people to its cities, the largest wave of urban population growth the world has ever seen. How can the continent begin to prepare today?
Low governance capacity translates into a web of planning regulations, zoning laws, building codes, construction permitting processes, and land use restrictions that are often either over-zealous, nonsensical, selectively weaponized for political purposes, or otherwise completely ignored. In the 1970s and ’80s, for example, the World Bank implemented a program called Sites and Services that proactively installed basic infrastructure (roads and rudimentary water mains) in greenfield areas on the fringes of fast-growing developing-world cities. A recent study by Michaels et al. (2021) on a Sites and Services program in several Tanzanian cities showed four to five decades later that the areas treated with this UX-esque intervention had higher-quality housing, improved electricity connectivity, and better access to water mains and roads.
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