TWO CITIES, ONE PATTERN
On June 3, 2015, heavy rainfall over Ghana’s capital Accra overwhelmed a drainage network, and floodwater pooling around a fuel station caught fire. What followed were some devastating results: the floods affected 53,000 people and caused USD 55 million in damages. The event became a wakeup call, renewing national attention to urban flood management.
Two years later and 3,000 kilometers to the south-east, a different kind of pressure began building on Mozambique’s northern coast. An insurgency erupted in Cabo Delgado in 2017, displacing more than a million people, of which many moved towards the relative safety of Pemba. The city’s population has nearly doubled since, with new arrivals settling where land could be found, often in flood-prone lands and on unregistered plots.
In both cases, the city’s growth simply outran the systems meant to steer it – the plans, finances and institutions all struggling to keep up with rapid urbanisation. The Green Cities, Infrastructure and Energy Programme (GCIEP) works exactly to bridge that gap. It supports these hidden layers: helping cities build the institutions, skills and processes to reach inclusive and climate-resilient development.
Drawing on GCIEP’s urban development work in Ghana, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo, this article asks what it takes to move a city from plans on paper to delivery on the ground. The gap between the two is rarely closed by a single project, and instead requires the slower work of building the systems that make projects possible.
THE SCALE OF THE CHALLENGE
The next chapter of urbanisation will be written in a surprisingly small number of places.
Two-thirds of global population growth by 2050 is taking place in cities and concentrated in seven countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Bangladesh and Ethiopia. Together, these countries will add more than half of the 982 million new urban residents the world is expected to gain.
Three features of this growth define the challenge. First, it is outpacing the built environment’s capacity to absorb it in a planned way. The world’s constructed areas have been expanding twice as fast as its population since 1975, much of that expansion being informal, low-density and expensive to serve. Second, growth is landing on populations already exposed to climate risk. 60% of the world’s urban population lives in regions at risk from at least one type of major natural disaster. The third challenge is financial. Global investment needs for urban infrastructure are estimated at $4.5 to $5.4 trillion per year – a figure that dwarfs official development assistance. Meanwhile, only 4% among the 500 largest cities in developing countries are considered creditworthy in international markets, and about 20% in local ones.
These trends will affect megacities and strategic hubs where the combination of rapid growth, fiscal constraint and climate exposure can create some real challenges. Kinshasa is a city of more than 17 million, where collapsed drainage now threatens five million residents. In Ghana, the number of people living in informal settlements increased by 60%, from 5.5 million in 2017 to 8.8 million by 2020. Ghana will need an estimated $38 billion to fund its infrastructure requirements by 2047. In Nacala, Mozambique, over 80% of plots remain unregistered, undermining both planning and the revenue base that would pay for it.
It is this combination – fast, informal, fiscally constrained and climate-exposed – that makes piecemeal projects an inadequate response. These cities need the underlying systems that turn plans into pipelines and pipelines into delivery. Four of those systems recur across GCIEP’s urban portfolio: climate-integrated planning, project preparation, data and municipal capacity.
EMBEDDING CLIMATE CONSIDERATIONS INTO URBAN PLANNING
To avoid locking in vulnerability for decades to come, climate needs to be treated as a design input across everything a city builds. The financial logic is also compelling: nature-based solutions can be around 50% cheaper than grey infrastructure whilst providing added value through decarbonization, resilience, land value uplift and job creation. Yet, they attract less than 0.3% of current urban infrastructure spending.
Sekondi-Takoradi, on Ghana’s coast, shows what closing that gap looks like in practice. Facing worsening floods and deteriorating roads, GCIEP is supporting the city to develop an integrated investment package that combines road improvements with drainage and flood resilience. Rather than simply creating bigger concrete channels, the design works with the way the water already moves through the city: open spaces such as football pitches double as temporary retention areas during heavy rain; green strips absorb runoff water and create corridors for wildlife; and the coastal lagoons and wetlands are protected so that they can keep soaking up floodwater and draining it to sea.
This is a deliberately pragmatic use of nature-based solutions. Idealistic, top-down NbS schemes often assume vast open space in which floodplains can be fully restored – an assumption that does not hold in dense informal settlements where people have already built in the low-lying areas. GCIEP’s response is a hybrid one, using targeted green infrastructure where it multiplies value.
There is a second reason to embed climate considerations early: it changes what a project is worth to investors. Development finance institutions and climate funds often require climate-risk integration, environmental and social safeguards and low-carbon options as conditions of eligibility. Restructuring the Sekondi-Takoradi package to integrate nature-based solutions allowed the investment options to be organized in a way that meet different donors’ financing conditions, widening the pool of capital the projects can draw on. Climate integration, in other words, is also an important determinant of bankability.
THE MISSING MIDDLE: PROJECT PREPARATION
Between a city’s masterplans and a financed project lie several steps that make investment possible: feasibility studies, technical designs, business cases, environmental and social assessments, and financial structuring. The Nacala prefeasibility study shows what this involves in practice: preliminary design options tested against land constraints, a screening of environmental and social impacts such as resettlement risks, cost estimates covering capital, operations and maintenance, an assessment of what the municipality could realistically afford to run, and consultation with the communities affected. Together, these answers turn a proposal into a bankable offer that a financier can appraise.
Good preparation pays in more than one way. First, it can revive projects that have stalled. Earlier feasibility studies for an urban sanitation project in Ghana existed, but the investments they described were unaffordable. By shifting to lower-cost treatment technologies, exploring the conversion of waste into products such as compost and energy, and revising the underlying analyses, GCIEP turned the studies that had stalled into propositions investors could act on.
Secondly, preparation can unlock capital many times its own costs. In Pemba, GCIEP prepared business cases and piloted the tools to put the city’s Strategic Investment Framework into practice, then put them in front of investors. Following a roundtable and a conceptual design note, the African Development Bank has committed $500,000 to take forward the Bypass Green Road project. This will allow for the transport of critical minerals in Pemba to move away from densely populated neighbourhoods, whilst also opening land for new urban development and jobs.
DATA AS THE FOUNDATION FOR BETTER URBAN DECISIONS
Many of the world’s fastest-growing cities risk planning blind: settlements expand faster than they are mapped, and homes are built on unstable slopes and along eroding coastlines. To steer growth away from its most vulnerable locations, a city first needs to know where those locations are, and who is already living there.
In Kinshasa, recurrent flooding in the east was widely attributed to “poor drainage”, but the specific failures in the network were less clear. Using open-source tools, GCIEP audited 52.8 kilometers of drainage, finding that over two-thirds of it was completely non-functional – blocked by waste, sediment and encroachment. This mapping meant that brigades could be sent straight to the blockages, and informal neighbourhoods became part of the official planning picture. The lesson is therefore also about how data can unlock new institutional responses, and allowing flood responses to become less reactive.
Ghana’s Climate Multi-Hazard Dashboard applies the same principle to forward planning. Operational in nine cities, it maps which neighbourhoods are exposed to which hazards, and crucially, does so over timeframes that match municipal planning cycles (in contrast to the 50-to-100-year horizons of traditional risk mapping). This means that assemblies preparing their medium-term development plans can now act on a five-year flood scenario in ways they never could, from restricting housing in flood-prone areas to directing drainage and green infrastructure where it reduces the most risk.
THE IMPORTANCE OF GOVERNANCE AND MUNICIPAL CAPACITY
From investor engagement to data systems, none of these elements will endure unless the responsible institutions can sustain them. Municipalities hold the mandate for planning, land and services, but often lack the staff, systems and revenues to exercise it. The real test of GCIEP’s work is therefore to build capacity within municipalities that they can sustain, and expand on, even after the programme has ended.
Fundamental to building municipal capacity is ownership. Formal plans and technical tools are insufficient without governance arrangements locked in behind them, particularly in urban settings, where investments demand coordination across land use, transport and infrastructure. In Kinshasa, GCIEP’s response was to change the intervention sequence itself: a dedicated project phase in which institutional roles were defined and formally validated with counterparts before the technical work began, so that the pilots that followed were co-designed with the institutions that would run them.
The second foundation is the means to generate and manage revenue. The digital cadasters piloted in Nacala and Pemba are now operated by municipal staff trained by the programme, with 300 registered parcels proving the concept and a clear pathway for the municipalities to scale it. Each registered parcel strengthens tenure security, encouraging households to invest, and makes land visible and taxable. Alongside this, GCIEP helped strengthen how municipalities plan their finances, manage their investments and assets, and handle debt. With own-source revenues currently below 15% of municipal budgets, this support offers municipalities the instrument to grow that share themselves.
The third is a network of communities and local organisations invested in the outcomes. Solutions can endure and be more inclusive when the people affected have helped shape them. For example, training local communities to operate and maintain coastal defenses helps fill the gaps where municipal government is stretched thin. This approach can also build on informal systems that already exist rather than replacing them: in Kinshasa, GCIEP’s community-based desilting brigades formalized and equipped the kind of local clearing work already happening in flood-prone neighbourhoods.
LESSONS FROM URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Let us return to the two cities where this article began. Accra’s floods exposed the devastating consequences when urban development falls behind. A decade on, nine Ghanaian cities plan against a live hazard dashboard, and feasibility work has converted flood risk into more than £110 million in committed and prospective investment. Pemba faced a doubling of its population with no sufficient plan to absorb this growth. Today, it has detailed neighborhood plans, a growing cadastre, the country’s first urban observatory, and a project pipeline that has already drawn the interest from the African Development Bank. Neither city has solved urbanization, but both are much better equipped to govern it. And despite their very different contexts, there are some common lessons.
Many infrastructure gaps are institutional and operational, not only technical. Kinshasa’s drainage crisis was as much a governance as an engineering problem. By giving structure to the informal clearing already happening, letting data decide where to start, and settling who would maintain what, GCIEP produced models that hold up operationally.
Taking climate seriously pays twice. Nature-based approaches often handle problems like flooding at lower cost than conventional engineering, and designing climate risk into a project also opens doors to funders who treat it as a condition of investment. In Ghana and Mozambique, integrating nature-based solutions into projects delivered both benefits: more resilient infrastructure, and access to a broader pool of finance.
Digital tools help the most when they fit with how governments work. Ghana’s climate hazard map can influence decisions because it speaks to the questions officials are already dealing with, on their timescale. Anchored to real planning cycles, it functions as a governance instrument, rather than a one-off study.
Municipal capacity works best when the pieces connect. A city runs on linked systems, which need to be strengthened across. This can create compounding effects: a cadastre enables taxation, revenue makes investment plans credible, and credible plans attract finance. The cities taking in the next billion urban residents won’t be reshaped by isolated flagship projects, but by whether their plans, budgets, data and institutions pull in the same direction.
More about this series
This article is the third and final in a series on the Green Cities, Infrastructure and Energy Programme (GCIEP), exploring global trends across key sectors – including transport, energy, and urban development – and how projects are advancing climate resilience and sustainable solutions in practice.
GCIEP is a global programme funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), working across more than 70 projects in 24 countries to accelerate sustainable infrastructure and climate-resilient urban development. The programme provides technical assistance, capacity building and policy support to governments, public agencies, investors, businesses and UK partners – helping to strengthen enabling environments and mobilise finance for low-carbon, resilient and inclusive infrastructure.
Over the past two years, ASI has delivered GCIEP across a diverse set of countries, including: Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Ukraine, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
