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.

Project Objectives – Climate Change, Water Supply
in Coastal Settlements of Post-War Angola

• Improve knowledge about the climate and
hydrology in coastal areas of Angola by filling the
data gaps in order to understand trends and
variability.

• Improve information about settlement patterns and
population in four of Angola’s urban coastal cities,
housing over 10 million people. Assess the risks,
impact and vulnerability from flooding and erosion
at present and under future climate scenarios.

• Create tools for adaptation planning in Angola’s
urban coastal cities, especially for vulnerable social
groups, and develop options for better water and
settlement management.

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.

Estrutura da apresentação

1- O Desenvolvimento Humano na era do Antropoceno

2- Trajetória de Angola no desenvolvimento humano

3- Conclusões

Angola is endowed with significant natural wealth, but it will need to better manage these resources
and reinvest them into other forms of capital to establish a sustainable development path. Before
independence, the country was a relatively advanced economy with diverse exports, although its
population suffered under exploitative colonial rule. Decades of conflict, during the fight for
independence and the civil war that followed, exacted a heavy toll on the population, infrastructure, and
the economy. The end of the war in 2002 and a booming oil industry resulted in strong economic growth,
but the poor saw very little benefit from this economic prosperity. The dependence on oil exports has
created macroeconomic instability, and Angola has suffered periods of fiscal contraction due to
fluctuations in commodity prices. Although the country has enjoyed strong gross domestic product (GDP)
growth, this has been achieved by depleting natural capital for consumption, rather than reinvestment in
other types of capital to generate sustainable growth. The recent change in leadership represents a
window of opportunity for political and economic reform that will allow Angola to put itself on a path
toward sustainable development.