Africa’s megacities in waiting

The fourth industrial revolution might be digital, but the physical reality is unprecedented urbanisation. And no continent has more urbanisation potential than Africa.?

Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa. These are Africa’s present megacities, teeming with activity but featuring overwhelmed infrastructure, due to uncontained urban sprawl.?

Africa’s next megacities will be smarter, mirroring the maturing influence of demographic and economic promise predicted a decade ago.?

Dar es Salaam is East Africa’s megacity in waiting. The Tanzanian capital has an inarguable political legacy and significance, as the origin point of East African decolonisation, under Julius Nyerere.?

Lucrative gas fields in Tanzania’s southern coastal region will secure much of the country’s future economic growth. International companies and domestic start-ups will use Dar es Salaam as their headquarters, as billions in liquefied natural gas revenues power Tanzania's future development.?

Nearly sharing Dar es Salaam’s line of latitude, but on the opposite coast, is Luanda. The global sustainable energy narrative might be hawkish on oil, but the core hydrocarbon remains crucial to making many products. Angola’s oil curse has been real, with a crippling civil war spread over four decades.?

The peace dividend and smarter oil revenue distribution will position Luanda as southern Africa’s next megacity, following Johannesburg.?

Beyond the petroleum industry, Angola has immense natural resources. Rich offshore fishing grounds and fertile inland agriculture, make Angola a potent candidate in the global food trade, feeding counter-seasonal markets in the global north, such as America, most of Europe, India, and China. Food product transhipment will route through Luanda, where Angola’s administrative and technical functions are clustered.?

Luanda’s city planners and infrastructure engineers will have to address the issue of a rapidly expanding city, with virtually no rainfall. Desalination plants or a canal project, harvesting and routing water from Angola’s rainfall-rich inland plateaus, could be the smartest deployment of its oil revenue windfall.?

Oil. Coffee. Chocolate. These are the keyword economic activities when analysts brainstorm west Africa. Ivory Coast might have modest oil exports, but it is surrounded by significant OPEC members, spurring a lot of adjacent economic growth. ?

Less chaotic and more liveable than Lagos, the Ivorian capital is shaping up to become West Africa’s financial and tech city of choice. With less population crush and migration, Ivorian planners will heed the lessons of Lagos and create a more sustainable growth story for the capital city that controls global chocolate sourcing.?

Property investors, both private and commercial, should be considering capital deployment in the evolving African megacities of Dar es Salaam, Luanda, and Abidjan.?

Written by Lance Branquinho