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.

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 on a scale that in sub-Saharan Africa is second only to post-apartheid South Africa. Decades of rural-urban migration have turned Angola into one of Africa’s most urbanized countries, with 62% of its population living in cities. State-delivered subsidized housing has satisfied an important segment of the middle-class and better-paid civil servants, but few of the urban poor benefited from Angola’s major budget allocations for housing that failed to deliver on commitments made to build sustainable and equitable cities. With the collapse of oil prices after 2014, the Angolan state budget has been drastically reduced, and it is unlikely that the government will be able to provide investment and subsidies to continue building new large-scale housing projects. While the private sector, both international and local, has to date, been a major beneficiary of construction contracts from the state. The private sector has been reluctant to provide its own financing and to invest in real estate itself, 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 the engagement of private-sector participation in providing direct financing for the housing sector.

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.

The majority of Angola’s peri-urban population still rely on informal mechanisms for water supply. This water is expensive and of poor quality, representing a significant household expenditure for the urban poor. The article uses qualitative tools and tracking of the supply chain to analyze the scope of the informal water economy in Luanda. Marketing water at the local household level involves significant trading in social capital. A financially sustainable model of community water management that builds on this neighbourhood social capital has been adopted by the government for implementation across the country.

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.

Angola’s civil war caused a massive population movement from rural conflict areas to low-lying coastal zones between 1975 and 2002. More than half of Angola’s 27 million people now live in urban coastal settlements, floodplains and steep ravines vulnerable to climate extremes. Climaterelated risks are worsening and it is important to understand and prepare for them. Angola’s coastal areas are experiencing increasingly variable rainfall and pressure on water supplies and markets. But a dearth of relevant data has made it difficult to assess these risks. This paper demonstrates innovative methods in filling the information gap and how changes were introduced in how water is governed in four Angolan coastal 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.

The Angolan Government, in its public pronouncements, has put great store in the private sector in driving post-war development and taking the lead particularly in the housing sector. However the World Bank has shown that Angola remains one of the world’s most difficult countries to do business, particularly in the sale and transfer of property. In the 1990s Angola had the daunting task of transforming, what had been a centrally-planned post-independence economy into a more open liberalised one that would attract foreign investment. At the end of the war in 2002 the country hoped to attract international investors and know-how to rebuild its devastated infrastructure and help meet the huge social demands for housing and employment. The Angolan Government rightly identified some of the key steps that needed to be taken to attract the private sector assistance. It committed itself to the provision of fiscal incentives, a reform of the system of credit for housing and the creation of public-private partnerships. However the growth of the private sector in Angola was inhibited by several historic factors.

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.

Despite the significant demand for rented housing in Angola, it does not feature in Angola’s National Urbanisation and Housing Program1. This is unsurprising as few African Governments do give rented housing the attention that it deserves. Governments tend not to recognize that rental housing exists as an important form of housing tenure and that many households rent their housing at some stage in their housing career. For political reasons home ownership is the preferred housing option. However, rented housing appears to be unavoidable while households raise the capital to buy or build their own home, or while searching for land and saving for the building of a self-build home