Cities Without Jobs: Africa's Urban Crisis

The fate of the world's fastest-growing continent will affect us all

Expressway in Lagos, Nigeria. (Image: Factual Evolution Media via Wikimedia Commons)

This essay was originally published by UnHerd

In an era when “crisis” is the word on everyone’s lips, there are still few places as crisis-stricken as the Horn of Africa, where war, drought, a booming population and a dearth of economic opportunities are making life unbearable for millions. European eyes may glaze over at the news of hardship in Africa, but such apathy looks increasingly untenable given the scale of migration in the 21st century. Somali refugees have been settling in Europe, and Britain especially, since the Nineties. In the 2010s, a wave of Eritreans took the northern route across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Ethiopian asylum seekers are among those occupying the state-funded hotels which have attracted protests in British towns this summer.

While the Horn of Africa endures some of the worst conditions, huge swathes of the continent experience chaos and deprivation in some degree. To understand the structural reasons for this, we must look at Africa’s cities. Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing an urban transition of a kind unique in history. Though it is currently the world’s least urbanised region, with slightly less than half of its 1.4 billion people living in cities, that proportion is climbing rapidly, driven by phenomenal birth rates and migration from rural areas. In other parts of the world, starting with Britain in the 19th century, movement to cities was accompanied by the growth of manufacturing industries, providing jobs and helping to supply modern infrastructure. In Africa, however, this economic transformation has not yet taken place. Along with its increasingly dry and unpredictable climates, the greatest strain on Africa’s future comes from the simple fact that there is not enough formal employment for its rapidly growing numbers of young, urban people.

As Robert Rotberg has written, sub-Saharan Africa is “experiencing the most rapid population increases anywhere, ever”, such that “half of all the babies born on the planet between now and 2050” will be delivered in the region. African women begin having babies, on average, in their early 20s, meaning that generations compound faster than elsewhere. Thanks to improved medicine, more of those infants, and mothers, now survive.

The population statistics are far from reliable, but those collected by the World Bank at least give a sense of scale. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have 4.3 children each. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Chad, they have more than six each. Whereas, in 1975, Africa had half as many people as Europe, by the middle of this century it will have three times more, and the median African will still be in their mid-20s. This growth will be concentrated in urban Africa. The continent has 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing cities, and in the coming decades many of its urban centres will double or triple in size.

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Many African cities display what appear to be impressive feats of development. Returning to the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a case in point. Flush with Chinese and Emirati cash, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is razing much of the city’s historic core and replacing it with grand parks and museums, plazas, hotels and offices. The horizon blooms with skyscrapers and condominiums. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian state has for over two decades been seeking to foster an industrial revolution, directing investment towards factories, railways, housing, and an enormous hydroelectric plant in the form of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. For much of that time, economic growth has averaged an impressive 9% annually.

And yet, behind the glamorous projects and flattering statistics, prosperity remains scarce. Despite Ethiopia’s frighteningly low wages — Ethiopian textile workers earn half as much as those in Bangladesh — the country is struggling to follow East Asian countries along the manufacturing route to development. There is much more automation now, and complex supply chains allow firms to use African workers for discrete tasks, such as assembling components made elsewhere, which don’t add up to proper industries. This leaves few paths towards mass employment or higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.

The struggle to industrialise has grave consequences for political stability. Ethiopia has Africa’s second largest population (though estimates vary significantly), and drought-stricken rural areas are regularly on the verge of famine. Like many African countries, Ethiopia also has deep ethnic divisions, with the army struggling against violent uprisings in three different regions. Young men without hope of employment provide the recruiting pools for local militias, and for the bandit parties that kidnap travellers and employees of foreign businesses.

As for the shiny precincts of Addis Ababa, these cater to a relatively small middle class that works for the state or has managed to plug into the global service sector. Thousands of less fortunate residents have been forcibly evicted by Abiy’s schemes. Much of the property development in the city is highly speculative, and many projects are never finished. Urban development has been a source of conflict in the past. The previous government’s plans to expand Addis Ababa at the expense of farmers in the surrounding region were abandoned amid protests and violence.

Little wonder that so many Ethiopians, and Africans more generally, do not remain in the cities where they first arrive, but want to emigrate further afield. Thanks to modern media and communication, they know that people elsewhere have better lives and far higher wages, that there are routes for reaching those places, and that some emigrants actually make it. With Europe’s current asylum system, ambitious and determined young men especially have a good chance of being awarded work and residence rights, if they can just get there. But Europe is only the destination for a small percentage of Africa’s emigrants, most of whom move within the continent itself. For Ethiopians, another major migration route flows eastwards across the Red Sea, towards Saudi Arabia. It is a brutal journey along roads littered with decomposing corpses, and those who are not gunned down by Saudi border guards often face appalling exploitation within the Gulf kingdom itself. Millions of Ethiopians try their luck anyway.

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Many of Africa’s swelling cities show similar patterns to Addis Ababa. Globalisation has fractured these spaces, allowing small pockets to leap ahead and join the advanced industries of the 21st century, while leaving the rest with Chinese-made phones and consumer goods but few opportunities for training or employment. A large part of the continent’s wealth, such as it is, has come from primary resources like fossil fuels and metals, often extracted by foreign companies, creating small numbers of rich individuals rather than a large body of skilled wage earners. Well over half of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, lacking reliable access to clean water, sanitation, and other basic services. A still higher proportion earn their living in the informal economy, working as street vendors and casual labourers, smugglers and traders, their businesses and occupations unknown to the government.

Nowhere will the dramas of the African city play out on a larger scale than in Lagos, the Nigerian metropolis on the Atlantic coast. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country by far, and that population is growing rapidly, due to overtake the United States by 2050. Lagos is destined to become one of the world’s largest urban centres. It may eventually merge with coastal cities in four other countries, together forming, as Howard French puts it, “the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people”.

Nigeria has one of Africa’s leading economies, boasting the continent’s largest oil and gas reserves, as well as strengths in manufacturing, tech, finance and other services. Yet 90 million Nigerians are thought to live in extreme poverty. Likewise, Lagos is home to an impressive middle class of educated professionals and businesspeople, but the city cannot keep up with the sheer speed of its own growth. More than 1,000 new inhabitants arrive each day.

According to the Polish-Nigerian political scientist Remi Adekoya, the situation in cities like Lagos is worsened by the bad governance of Nigeria’s narrow political elite. There is, he told me, “huge frustration” and “a feeling of helplessness” among middle-class Nigerians, who are unable to leverage their resources to improve the country since they have “zero influence over the political system”.

One might think that a frustrated middle class combined with large numbers of underemployed young people would make Nigerian cities ripe for political unrest. But Adekoya says there are powerful factors working against such a possibility. One is simply repression. “They know that their governments are ruthless, and will not hesitate to send out soldiers on the streets to shoot at them,” he says. Another is religion, which plays an important role in the lives of most Africans, and can lead them to interpret inequality in terms of divine favour. Finally, there is the fear that political convulsions will lead to Nigeria — like Ethiopia and many other African nations composed of different groups ­­— “descending into ethnic-based civil war”.

Instead, political disillusionment has encouraged what Adekoya calls “a form of escapism”, whereby middle-class people focus their energies on the private sphere. Many have opted for a more literal escape too. A large diaspora of talented Nigerians is making its mark overseas, in countries like Britain, where it has been notably successful in politics, business, the arts, and many other fields. Between 2017-2023, about 100,000 Nigerians departed to study in the UK. 75,000 nurses left Nigeria over the same period. Polls regularly report that 60-70% of young Nigerians are eager to relocate to other countries.

This is not just a problem for Nigeria, of course. Somewhere in the region of 70,000-100,000 trained professionals leave Africa each year. In Britain, we tend to discuss the morality of immigration rather myopically in terms of the value of openness, the merits of diversity and the benefits to our economy, rarely considering the cost to poorer countries of losing their most educated and ambitious young citizens. Yet there is surely a cost when a third of African scientists live outside the continent, when there are more Zimbabwean midwives in Britain than in Zimbabwe, and more Ethiopian physicians in Chicago than in Addis Ababa. The World Health Organisation predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will face a deficit of 5.3 million health workers by 2050.

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But as European governments struggle with rising anti-immigration sentiment, they are now most concerned with reducing the numbers that are coming to the continent illegally or to claim asylum. According to the current consensus, endorsed by Britain’s Labour government as well, this is best achieved by investing in Africa to address the conditions that spur migration, and to bribe African governments to act as an advance border control. In theory, this diplomatic approach can tie in with other European agendas in Africa, such as gaining access to natural resources, combatting radical Islam and checking Chinese and Russian influence.

The British government last year pledged £84 million to address factors driving migration in North and East Africa, through a combination of skills programmes and humanitarian aid. But the real champion of this African strategy is Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has consistently pushed something called the Mattei Plan for Africa. A series of meetings with African leaders has resulted in a scheme for €5.5 billion of investment in energy, education, health and agriculture across more than a dozen African countries. Italy wants help stemming migration in the Mediterranean, while looking to benefit from African oil and gas.

This summer, the Mattei Plan was officially folded into EU policy, as Meloni staged a joint summit with European commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Rome. They announced funding for a railway in the Lobito Corridor, an area rich in strategic minerals that links Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. They also committed to debt relief and an undersea cable linking Europe with East Africa.

But Europe’s stance is not quite as it appears. The key goals guiding the EU’s investment in Africa are “sustainable growth” and an “inclusive, green and digital” economic transformation. These are the same policy clichés preferred by most of the Western NGOs supporting development in the continent. The problem, as numerous African politicians and activists have pointed out, is that no other region has successfully developed its economy by green or sustainable means; they have all relied on the intensive use of fossil fuels to foster industrialisation. There is as yet no proven path to development through renewables, let alone through digital technology, and the evidence in Africa is hardly promising so far. Almost half of Africans lack reliable electricity, while three quarters of those in rural areas have no internet access.

The grim truth is that European leaders and development agencies do not want Africa to turn into an even bigger China sitting just across the Mediterranean; a powerful industrialised region with over two billion people, placing enormous demands on the world’s resources and producing vast quantities of carbon emissions. Like infrastructure investments which facilitate the extraction of natural resources, contributions to “sustainable growth” in Africa are a cynical form of generosity. They really amount to paying Africans to remain poor.

And yet, Meloni was surely right when she said at the recent summit in Rome, “Africa is the continent where our future is most at stake.” The Mediterranean and even the Sahara are no longer clear civilisational borders; millions of people in Europe now have family ties with Africa. Short of dramatically different immigration policies, or breakthroughs in automation that reduce demand for foreign labour, it is difficult to see how these connections will not continue to grow. Asylum systems will need to change if European governments are to address popular anger over porous borders and immigration. But Africa will soon have a larger working age population than India or China, and there will be plenty of economic interests clamouring to use that workforce on our own ageing continent.

For Africa itself, the greatest challenge remains that of providing its burgeoning numbers of young people with livelihoods to meet their needs and ambitions — something which can only be accomplished within the continent’s new urban worlds. If it fails this challenge, then the pressure valve of emigration will not be enough to prevent growing political instability, an outcome that is already manifest in many African countries. Cities will be the engines of Africa’s transformation, or the ultimate symbols of its tragedy.