After decades of focus on rural underdevelopment, the development sector has now built a whole catalogue of programs pertaining to Africa’s urbanization. This urbanization is depicted as as an ambivalent process, rife with both challenges and opportunities. This workshop of Ifri's research program "Governing Africa's Urban Transitions" (GouvUrba) will focus on Liza Cirolia's research on Africa's urban infrastructure. 

Liza Rose Cirolia is a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. In this seminar, she will reflect on the ways in which international development finance discourse "lands" in African cities and the related challenges of financial urban infrastructure faced by urban authorities. She will look into two cases from her recent work where very different actors, processes and technologies are involved in tending to infrastructural deficits on the continent. Liza will first discuss the role of Karpowership in supplying urban energy, with a focus on Freetown. Second, the presentation will look at remittance infrastructures, focusing on Somalia. The aim is to spark a debate about how the development sector might enroll non-traditional development actors into our thinking on financing infrastructure in African cities. 

Moderation: Sina Schlimmer, Researcher at the Sub-Saharan Africa Center, Ifri, Head of the GouvUrba program