Alioune Badiane, the regional director for Africa and Asia in the UN Habitat, told ministers -- at a round table meeting in Maputo on Tuesday -- that urbanization was increasingly becoming a reality on the African continent.
"The bank should strengthen its analytic skills in the development of the urban sector which is currently very poor.
"The AfDB needs to coordinate with United Nations Agencies in order to improve urban development," said Badiane.
He was making a presentation entitled "Fostering Shared Growth, Urbanisation Inequalities and Poverty in Africa," at a ministerial session ahead of the African Development Bank annual meeting which begins on May 14.
Urbanisation of most African nations had increased from 37 percent in 1970 to 47 percent in the year 2000 and it was projected to increase to 60 percent in 2030, said Baidane.
Badiane also said the bank needed to help local authorities develop working programmes that would address the issues of slums which had sprouted in most of the cities on the continent.
"We need to help local authorities to ensure good governance of cities.
"Very few African cities -- about 10 percent of them -- have land registers. We need to build a knowledgeable base of our people so that we know where they live and what they do in order to help them," he said.
In his opening remarks to the ministers' meeting, AfDB president Donald Kaberuka, said while the majority of Africans who live in absolute poverty were in rural areas, the number of urban poor was fast increasing.
He, however, said the recent food crisis had revealed the despair of the urban poor.
"Governments in low income countries are challenged by the
unprecedented urban growth, the mushrooming slums are plain evidence," he said.
Kaberuka said the AfDB was developing a policy approach to address the issue of the urban poor.
"The phenomenon is irreversible -- and it is fastest on our
continent. Therefore, we will have to be innovative," he said.
Currently an estimated 360 million Africans live in urban areas and most of them are poor, earning their living from the informal economy.
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