Africa's Urban Infrastructure Development: Ambivalent Projects, Emerging Actors, and Worldmaking Technologies
Practical information
Themes and regions
Related centers and programs
This is a private event.
Learn more about our corporate support packagesOver the past twenty-five years, a confluence of factors, from rapid growth to disastrous impacts of climate change, has focused global attention on African cities.

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
Related Subjects
Other events

Foreign Intelligence Services Amidst the War in Ukraine: Adapting to a New Strategic Reality
European foreign intelligence services have had to continuously adapt to the rapidly evolving security landscape of the past few years. Following challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, financial crises, and hybrid threats, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has placed conventional military conflict at the centre of European security concerns.

Affirming European Security in Ukraine and the Black Sea Region
European security has been challenged in 2022 with the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

Doing Politics in African Cities: Actors, Causes and Forms of Urban Social Mobilization
From Maputo to Nairobi and from Lagos to Dakar: recently, African cities have been the theatre of mobilizations by groups of young protesters.