Community-driven pathways for implementation of global urban resilience goals in Africa

With one billion people worldwide now living in slums and projections suggesting a threefold increase by 2050, the magnitude of implementation challenges facing stakeholders to new global urban, poverty-reduction and climate change commitments are clear. In Africa, where urban growth is almost synonymous with slum growth, entrenched inequality and impoverishment produces multidimensional risk accumulation and threatens the continent's ability not only to implement new commitments, but also to sustain the achievements made to date. This paper, developed from a practitioner viewpoint, argues that an under-utilized and under-resourced strategy for urban risk-reduction and resilience-building is community-driven slum upgrading. It suggests that African cities pursuing a resilient development agenda can significantly increase their implementation capacity through partnership with organized communities.