Papers by DW

The need to make cities in Africa ‘more inclusive, safe, resilient and
sustainable’, as encapsulated in the stand-alone urban goal 11
adopted as part of the 17 United Nations (UN) Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, is undisputed as rapid urban
growth rates are set to make the African region a key hub in the
global transition to a predominantly urban world. This will not
only require new and more transformative public policies that
address the social, economic and environmental dimensions of
sustainable development, but also data to inform planning,
implementation and reporting.

The Angolan State’s post-war center-piece reconstruction program, to provide the human
right to ‘Water to All’, remains incomplete. The majority of Angola’s peri-urban communities still
use the informal market to fill the gap. Water selling is the largest sub-sector of Luanda’s extensive
informal economy, involving extractors, transporters and retailers. Negotiating for water at the local
household level involves significant trading in social capital. Communities in Angola’s musseques
have built on neighborhood solidarity to manage the supply of water themselves. The article is
drawn from the authors’ experience in practice to examine the complexity of Angola’s informal
water economy and local-level innovative responses. The Government has drawn on these lessons
and adopted the community management model MoGeCA (the Portuguese language acronym for
Model of Community Water Management)to help address the shortfall. The article is written from
a practitioner’s point of view, based on more than a decade of experimentation in practice and support
from USAID and UNICEF in taking community management to the national scale.

Africa has some of the world’s most unequal cities. Informal settlements in African cities, and the struggles that are fought in their defense, are evidence of deep-rooted exclusion. They have inherited colonial segregated planning laws that are socio-economically exclusive, resulting in cement cities and slums. In many African former colonial countries, a struggle for a right to the city formed an integral part of the fight against colonialism and apartheid. In the decades since independence, few African states have been able to develop and implement reforms governing urban development to effectively improve these characteristics of their cities.

Since the end of the civil war in 2002, the government of Angola has used Chinese credit facilities backed by petroleum-based guarantees to build prestige urban projects . The most famous is the public-privately developed Kilamba “Centralidade” with 20,000 apartments, China’s largest housing venture in Africa. With the collapse of oil prices through 2014 and 2017, the Angolan state budget has been drastically reduced, and the government will unlikely be able to provide investment and subsidies to continue building new housing like Kilamba. The private sector has been reluctant to provide their own financing and invest in real-estate themselves due to weak land tenure and the lack of legislative reforms to make a functional land market. Solving the problems around land may be a way to stimulate financing for the housing sector. Post-socialist countries like Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and China have unique opportunities through the conversion of State-monopoly-owned land for urban poverty reduction and social housing through land-value capture.

Angola’s National Urbanism and Housing Programme (PNHU) identified Cooperative Housing as one of the four key strategies adopted to meet the country’s deficit of more than one million dwelling units. The PNHU set a target for the construction of 80,000 cooperative housing units or 8% of the planned one million dwellings in the period up to 2015. Cooperative housing in Angola has roots that date back to colonial times when models were drawn from Portuguese cooperative traditions. In the post independence period after 1975, urban planning professionals returning home from training in eastern European, formerly socialist countries, brought back experience of cooperative housing models from countries where they studied or visited.

USAID is pleased to present the seventh edition of the CSO Sustainability Index (CSOSI) for Sub-Saharan Africa. The index describes advances and setbacks in seven key dimensions of sustainability in the civil society sector in 2015—the legal environment, organizational capacity, financial viability, advocacy, service provision, infrastructure, and public image. The reports are produced by an expert panel of CSO practitioners and researchers in each country included in this year’s index. The panels assess each dimension of CSO sustainability according to key indicators and
agree on a score, which can range from 1 (most developed) to 7 (most challenged). The scores for each dimension are averaged to produce an overall sustainability score for a given country’s CSO sector. An editorial committee composed of technical and regional experts then reviews the scores and corresponding narratives with an eye to ensuring consistent approaches and standards to allow for cross-country comparisons. The scores are grouped into three overarching categories—Sustainability Enhanced (scores from 1 to 3), Sustainability Evolving (3.1-5), and Sustainability Impeded (5.1-7)—which provide additional comparative benchmarks. Further details about the methodology used to calculate scores and produce corresponding narrative reports are provided in Annex A. The index is a useful source of information for CSOs, governments, donors, academics, and others who want to better understand and monitor key aspects of CSO sustainability in Sub-Saharan Africa. It complements similar indices covering countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A publication of this type would not be possible without the contributions of many individuals and organizations. We are particularly grateful to the Aga Khan Foundation, which supported the assessments of Kenya and Mali (as well as the indices for Afghanistan and Pakistan) and our implementing partners in each country, who facilitate the expert panel meetings and write the country reports. We also thank the many CSO representatives and experts, USAID partners, and international donors who participated in the expert panels in each country. Their knowledge, perceptions, ideas, and dedication are the foundation upon which this index is based.

The last year has seen the introduction of some long-outstanding fiscal reforms in Angola’s housing economy. The new Minister of Housing and Urban Development Ms Branca do Espírito Santo has brought some new insights from her years in senior management in the nominally-private-sector real-estate company IMOGESTIN and even earlier as director of a civil-society organization. She assumed her new post, in March 2016, as Angola entered into its second year of economic crises after the collapse of the country’s commodity prices

Access to land markets for housing and urban development continues to be both a challenge and an opportunity. Since its independence in 1975, and most notably since the end of the war, in 2002, Angola has undertaken to create a suitable legal framework to address the complex issues related to land access in the country. In 2004, the country promulgated a new law on land that has sought to strengthen areas taken as weakness in previous legislation. During the following decade a set of new legislation and regulations was published, covering issues such as concessions, and the functions of the local levels of government in the administration of land. However, ten years later, in December 2014, a national consultation on issues of land, led by private organizations came to the conclusion that the Land Law 9/04, did not deliver the expected results. Two key areas that have not been addressed in the legislation are the administration of land in peri-urban areas where the majority of the urban population live without the formal ownership and the regulation of customary land rights, particularly in rural areas.

In the Habitat Agenda adopted in 1996, heads of state and governments committed themselves to two main goals, i.e., “Adequate Shelter for All” and “Sustainable Human Settlements in an Urbanizing World”, and to implement a plan of action based on these goals. In the Millennium Declaration, heads of state and governments committed themselves to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. They also committed themselves to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without adequate sustainable access to drinking water and basic sanitation.

El artículo describe cómo el gobierno de Angola ha sido capaz de utilizar la financiación de líneas de crédito de China para construir proyectos de vivienda urbana de prestigio como los gobiernos busca hacer sus ciudades "clase mundial". En este trabajo se analiza el apoyo del Gobierno de Angola para la ciudad de Kilamba desarrollado público-privada con 20.000 apartamentos. Los apartamentos eran inicialmente demasiado caro para la mayoría de la población, y el Estado ha tenido que sacar más fondos de su presupuesto de vivienda para un esquema de subsidio de alquiler con opción a compra para hacer las unidades asequibles para los funcionarios públicos de nivel medio. El autor sostiene que la oportunidad se está perdiendo de utilizar los ingresos de hoy a partir de recursos naturales de alto precio y la corriente de fácil acceso a las líneas de crédito de China y los conocimientos técnicos para hacer frente a los grandes atrasos en el mejoramiento urbano de la infraestructura de servicios básicos y la vivienda para los pobres. En el documento también se refleja en un período posterior a la independencia anterior cuando se construyeron una serie de nuevas ciudades africanas, dejando a algunos países con décadas de la deuda y el desarrollo estancado. ¿Puede errores de los últimos ofrecen lecciones para el futuro desarrollo urbano de África?

In the coastal cities of Angola, the intensity and variability of climatic events such as rainstorms and floods have more than doubled over the last 60 years. For much of that period, conflict in the interior provinces was driving people to the relative safety of coastal cities – namely Cabinda, Luanda and the twin cities of Benguela/Lobito – where most settled in marginal and environmentally fragile land at the urban periphery. The growth of these settlements has resulted in the occupation of high risk, low cost land in river basins and swampy coastal locations. Cholera, malaria and other diseases are increasingly serious problems, linked to a lack of safe water and adequate sanitation. Increasing climate variability has compounded those problems, with rainfall tending to come in intense storms, causing flooding. Following floods in 2006, Luanda suffered a cholera epidemic with 35,000 cases reported.

This paper responds to Vanessa Watson’s article on the inappropriate urban development plans that are increasingly common in sub-Saharan Africa as governments seek to make their cities “world class”. It describes how the government of Angola has been able to use financing from Chinese credit facilities to build prestige projects that include support for the public-privately developed Kilamba city with 20,000 apartments. The apartments were initially too expensive for most of the population, and the state has had to draw further funds from its housing budget for a subsidized rent-to-purchase scheme to make the units affordable for middle-level civil servants. The author argues that an opportunity is being missed to use today’s income from high-priced natural resources and the current easy access to Chinese credit lines and technical expertise to address the very large backlogs in urban upgrading of basic service infrastructure and housing for the poor. The paper also reflects on a previous post-independence period when a number of African new cities were built, leaving some countries with decades of debt and stagnant development. Can errors from the past offer lessons for future African urban development?
KEYWORDS Angola / Chinese

O estudo sobre a migração para Angola foi elaborado pela unidade de pesquisa da Development Workshop, liderada por Andre Melo. Documento preparado por André Joaquim Melo, Development Workshop Angola. Esta publicação foi produzida com a assistência financeira da União Europeia. O conteúdo desta publicação é da inteira responsabilidade do autor e não pode em caso algum ser considerado como reflectindo a posição do Secretariado do Grupo dos Estados de África, Caraíbas e Pacífico (ACP), da União Europeia, da Organização Internacional para as Migrações (OIM) e dos outros membros do consórcio do Observatório ACP das Migrações, do UNFPA ou da Confederação Suíça.

O Observatório ACP das Migrações é uma iniciativa do Secretariado do Grupo dos Estados da África, das Caraíbas e do Pacífico (ACP), financiada pela União Europeia, implementada pela Organização Internacional para as Migrações (OIM) num consórcio com 15 parceiros e com o apoio financeiro da Suíça, da OIM, do Fundo da OIM para o Desenvolvimento e do UNFPA. Fundado em 2010, o Observatório ACP é uma instituição concebida para produzir dados relativos à migração Sul-Sul no Grupo dos Estados ACP para migrantes, para a sociedade civil e para os decisores políticos, bem como para aperfeiçoar as capacidades de investigação nos países ACP para a melhoria da situação dos migrantes e o fortalecimento da relação migração-desenvolvimento.

The case study demonstrates the gaining administrative recognition for local land management practices. The growing land market in Huambo City, along with weak and unenforceable land legislation, fostered the development of local practices in land management, often incorporating customary practices, like the traditional chief (soba) witnessing and the neighborhood bairro-level representatives approving transactions. The majority of urban residents purchased or acquired their land through some locally legitimate mechanism and most have documents to prove it. In response, the municipal authorities chose to recognise these mechanisms, thereby acknowledging and working with existing and management practices.

Published in Land & Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, Vol. 2-014. Environmental Law Institute & UN Environment Program - Earthscan, New York 2013. Since the end of the armed conflict in 2002, Angola’s recovery and remarkable economic growth have been fuelled by the extractive industries of petroleum and diamonds. The consolidation of peace, however—the reintegration of politically divided populations and excombatants—is much more linked to access to land. Land is not the only resource important to peacebuilding in post-conflict Angola, but it is a primary factor in social reconstruction. 

The postwar period in Angola provides an opportunity to resolve long-standing problems that, if left untended, may result in renewed conflict in the future. Angola’s legacy of conflict, which was partly fuelled by injustice related to land appropriation by the governing elites (both exogenous and indigenous), must still be addressed. Successive revisions of land legislation have not fundamentally addressed the underlying problems that originally led to conflict.

This teaching case study draws on research that investigated the extensive informal land market in Luanda, Angola. It 
examines how urban land is transacted and the mechanisms by which it is secured and regulated. It recognises the intense pressure on urban land experienced as a result of urban in- migration during and since the civil war. It shows the inability of the formal market to provide means for poorer people to access land, transact it and secure formal title or legally defensible land tenure. The case study is based on research undertaken by Development Workshop, Angola. The work was commissioned by the World Bank, with technical support from Urban LandMark.

Published in Environment & Urbanization, Volume 22, Number 2. This paper discusses how research on urban land promoted the need to formalize the poor’s informal occupation rights as the government developed a new land policy. The research looked at both formal and informal mechanisms to access land by poor and war-affected populations and at the institutions that influence this. Its findings helped persuade the government of the need for consultation, and promoted more awareness of how upgrading and basic service provision could improve land tenure.

Published in Reports on Foreign Aid & Development, Number 125. This report explores both the formal and customary laws that affect women’s property rights, examines issues of widowhood, divorce, polygamy and girl’s inheritance and provides recommendations for strengthening women’s rights to land.

O presente guia, elaborado e apresentado pelo Governo de Angola, através do Ministério do Urbanismo e Ambiente, com apoio metodológico da DW, é parte dos esforços do Governo e pretende lidar com a falta generalizada de informação, sobretudo entre a população peri-urbanas que possui terras (ocupadas de boa fé) sem nenhum titulo de ocupação emitido pelas autoridades municipais ou provinciais.

This is one ten case studies that were part of an International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) research programm on "Urban Poverty Reduction Programmes: Lessons of Experience". This paper describes the water and sanitation programmes that the NGO Development Workshop has developed in Luanda over the last 15 years, working with community organizations, local government and the official water and sanitation agencies.