A recent study from the Lancet found that by the start of the next century, more than half of all births will occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks to higher fertility rates and longer life expectancies, the continent’s population is on track to nearly double to 2.4 billion by 2050, then nearly double again, to 4.2 billion by 2100.

Within Africa, intermediary cities (noncapital cities, typically with a population of 1 million or fewer) are the fastest growing urban places. Between 2022 and 2030, intermediary cities are expected to account for nearly 50 percent of Africa’s overall urban population growth, and this growth will occur largely in cities that currently have fewer than 1 million people. For example, Zinder, the third-largest city in Niger, is expected to more than double its population between 2020 and 2035, growing from about a half-million to over 1 million residents.

The implications of this tremendous growth for people, communities, economies, and the environment are extraordinary, made even more complex by the impacts of climate change and climate migration.

A recent collaboration between the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Challenge Works investigated ways to support effective land use planning, infrastructure investments, land-based financing, and disaster resilience in rapidly growing intermediary cities in Africa. We used a mixed-methods approach that synthesizes literature reviews, interviews with urban policy experts and city officials, and specialist workshops.

We explored:

• the main goals of intermediary cities in Africa when it comes to managing growth;
• the barriers preventing such cities from using data-driven planning, mapping, and land-based financing tools; and
• how a challenge prize could accelerate the creation and scaling of such tools.

Below, we summarize some of the things we learned, and how we plan to take the idea of a challenge prize forward.

Growth is not inherently bad—but can have unintended consequences if not managed.

Often, with population growth comes economic opportunity and improved quality of life. More and better jobs, more economic mobility, and better access to health care, education, and sanitation are among the benefits of population growth.

However, we wanted to dig into questions of land use and infrastructure development knowing that:

• climate vulnerability risks are highest in rapidly growing cities;
• climate change will disproportionately impact people in rapidly urbanizing countries, particularly groups that are already vulnerable;
• the cost of retrofitting infrastructure in informal settlements is three times more expensive than new infrastructure development; and
• with two-thirds of African cities yet to be built, a small window of opportunity exists to make the necessary investments to support future growth patterns based on sustainable and equitable development principles.

Land use planning in intermediary cities is critical to creating more sustainable futures.

In speaking with city leaders and experts within government, NGOs, and industry working in this space, we learned that land use planning has different inputs, outputs, and outcomes. When these are integrated, a virtuous cycle can occur:

• cities can use evidence and insights to inform plans and policies;
• evidence-based, implementable plans that are created with input from diverse stakeholders are more likely to be enforced and lead to better outcomes; and
• this increases the level of trust and evidence available to inform new plans and policies.

The enabling ecosystem—which includes elements like institutional capacity to develop and implement plans, political dynamics, human capacity and skills, funding, cultural norms, and more—also plays an important role in creating and implementing land use plans (or conversely, limiting or obstructing progress).

We also learned that the loop can become ineffective for a number of reasons, which are generally attributed to two primary gaps: first, when effective, evidence-based land use plans are not created, due to organizational barriers (things like internal government silos or lack of planning capacity), political and economic barriers (things like political cycles and competition for resources), and technical barriers (such as lack of quality, up-to-date data); and second, when completed land use plans are not implemented, again due to organizational barriers (like complex land tenure), political and economic barriers (limited authority or resource to implement plans), and technical barriers (lack of local buy-in or weak enforcement powers).

Innovation has the potential to both address pain points within those gaps and strengthen the enabling ecosystem.

For example, we’ve identified city-specific use cases to create context-sensitive solutions that use data analytics to better plan for future mobility needs and transport infrastructure, or to better predict climate risk vulnerabilities and therefore inform land use regulations; apply crowdsourced data and citizen-sensing techniques to create and implement inclusive, equitable land use plans; or examine and collate property registration and valuations to bolster municipal finances and the use of land-based financial tools.

At the ecosystem level, creating new tools or adapting tools to the local context can help organizations leapfrog over traditional planning systems and catalyze new practices, and bring together government agencies or organizations that would not normally collaborate.

Tech solutions can help—but need to be paired with institutional enablers.

While our investigations confirmed the exciting potential for data-driven, digital technologies to help city leaders reduce risk and make more informed decisions, we also learned that new data collection and analysis tools are only as good as the planning and implementation processes they inform. Data-driven tools need to be developed in ways that are people-centered, inclusive, and fair, and are ineffective if they aren’t supported by an enabling ecosystem to implement and update effective plans.

Solutions that pair technical innovation with institutional innovation will enable intermediary cities in Africa to pioneer methods to manage growth in ways that are contextually appropriate and don’t yet exist.

A challenge prize can help spark and scale up solutions.

We propose to run an open innovation challenge in partnership with rapidly growing African intermediary cities. Such a challenge would invite innovators to create, test, and scale solutions to manage rapid growth. The challenge structure is based on partnering with cities to create an open call to innovators, oriented around a specific city use case, which will then work closely with city stakeholders to create custom, locally relevant solutions.

The challenge will include these fundamental features:

• Centering the challenge around opportunities cities want to address. Innovators will respond to challenge statements that reflect the goals cities want to achieve. This is different from, and complementary to, innovation funding approaches that focus on specific technologies or methods.
• Prioritizing scalable and replicable solutions. Our research revealed a number of promising innovations that are already being piloted and implemented in real-world settings. Despite this, scaling solutions remains a barrier. For instance, innovators who have the right data analytics solution may not have access to the permissions needed to test it in the real world, or the relationships to introduce it in places that need innovation. Local governments may not be prepared to adopt and maintain services. The challenge will be designed to address scaling barriers through seed funding, capacity-building, new business models, and access to customers, investors, and networks.
• Providing appropriate incentives and support for innovators to experiment and take risks. The outcome-based, stage-gated funding model of an innovation challenge means that innovators can experiment, while cities can benefit from crowding in a variety of ideas and expertise. Having access to both financial and nonfinancial support enables innovators to develop solutions in ways they might not be able to otherwise.
• Shaping and accelerating innovation in land use planning. By supporting multiple innovators working across multiple use cases and settings, the challenge can accelerate progress in the field of land use planning, as well as steer innovation in a direction more attuned to the needs of rapidly growing cities in low- and middle-income countries.

The time is now.

Africa is both the cradle of civilization and the world’s youngest continent, with half the population under the age of 19. The continent is also facing critical risks related to climate change and associated implications to disaster resilience, food and water security, energy supplies, and more. To ensure that future city growth in Africa is inclusive, equitable, sustainable, and resilient to changing conditions, we urgently need to take action now to accelerate and scale new models to manage growth. Our next steps are to assemble the partners to implement the next stage of the challenge. If you are interested in contributing, get in touch!

With sincere thanks to Stefan Chavez-Norgaard, Teodora Chis, Astrid Haas, Peter Oborn, and the many policy experts, development practitioners, city officials, tech innovators, and others who provided their insights and experiences to shape this program.

Lead image: City market street in Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa. Credit: peeterv via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

When heavy rains unload on Beaumont, Texas—which is to say, pretty often, in this small Gulf Coast city 80 miles east of Houston—flash flooding can turn the underpasses beneath train tracks and bridges into unpassable, sewage-laden lakes, as pump systems get overwhelmed.

It’s a citywide issue, but it’s especially problematic in Beaumont’s historic South End. Ringed on three sides by heavy industrial facilities—including a 2,400-acre ExxonMobil refinery and chemical plant, the 100-acre Port of Beaumont, and a facility that holds thousands of rail cars—such inundation can essentially leave residents and workers stranded in the neighborhood, with no way out.

“We’ve always had an issue where our underpasses flood, and so we’re trapped without access to emergency medical facilities,” says Christopher Jones, founder and director of the South End Charlton-Pollard Greater Historic Community Association. “During events like Harvey or Imelda, we’re trapped within that industrial horseshoe.”

The prospect of getting stranded by an everyday downpour creates anxiety for residents, as well as tangible health hazards. “Our streets fill up with sewer and rainwater, and there’s no cleanup that happens afterward, whether it’s from the city or the state of Texas,” Jones says. “Then that sewage matter dries up and becomes an airborne pathogen that we breathe,” along with other pollutants, such as limestone dust, sulfur, and petrochemical byproducts produced or transported nearby. Indeed, between the dangerous chemicals in nearby rail cars and refineries, its hurricane-prone location, and the increasing frequency of extreme heat waves, flooded roadways are hardly the only disaster-related risk facing the Charlton-Pollard neighborhood.

So when Jones heard about a request for proposals issued by the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP), he proposed a series of exploratory scenario planning workshops that would gather ideas and input from community members, city officials, emergency agencies, and local businesses, to formulate and prioritize resilience strategies.

The review committee found the Beaumont proposal unique and compelling for a couple of different reasons, says Heather Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. “It’s the first community organization awarded through this process,” Hannon says, as opposed to a municipal department, planning agency, or research team. What’s more, the proposal specifically focuses on the “dual-threat landscape” of both natural and man-made disasters.

The neighborhood is well aware of the “escalating risks posed by climate change, industrial accidents, and other man-made hazards,” Jones explained in his proposal. “Our community’s proximity to a dense concentration of industrial operations elevates the risk of chemical spills, industrial explosions, and air quality emergencies, in addition to natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and severe weather events.”

Jones says the old housing stock in his neighborhood isn’t very suitable for sheltering in place, whether it’s during a storm or a chemical spill. “My neighborhood dates back to the 1800s, and many of the homes here are, if not the same age as ExxonMobil, a little bit older.” Many of those homes lack the kind of weatherization upgrades—insulation, storm windows, air sealing—that would better protect them from storms and air quality issues.

“I definitely want my neighbors to have the opportunity to not only weatherize their homes, but to be able to seek safety and shelter inside of their homes if there’s anything like an explosion from ExxonMobil,” Jones says. When a series of chemical explosions rocked a TPC plant in nearby Port Neches in 2019, “We felt it—we smelled it,” Jones says.

“So if we were to experience something like, God forbid, a big waste of benzene, everybody here is [in serious trouble], because they don’t have the knowledge or adequate facilities to shelter in place,” he adds. “And that includes schools that are in our area, businesses in our neighborhood, elders . . . that, to me, is our starting point for our resilience.”

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The South End Charlton-Pollard project is one of five that the Consortium for Scenario Planning has chosen to support in response to the RFP. From Colombia to Canada, each project will design exploratory scenario planning workshops focused on disaster recovery and resilience. The awardees will have the opportunity to present and describe their work in early 2025 at the annual Consortium for Scenario Planning conference.

Awardees are tasked with designing workshops that use exploratory scenario planning (XSP) to help members of their community—which could be a neighborhood, city, or entire region—explore disaster recovery and resilience strategies. Applicants were encouraged to address both one-off disasters as well as those that are part of a larger cycle of “cascading hazards, where the effects of one disaster bleed into or cause another”—such as droughts that contribute to wildfires or landslides, or floods that destroy homes and then trigger sanitation crises.

In addition to the XSP workshops that the South End Charlton-Pollard Greater Historic Community Association will design and conduct in Beaumont, CSP selected four other proposals to support:

• Building off its recent completion of a participatory climate risk assessment, the Rural Municipality of Piney in Manitoba, Canada, will use a seven-step XSP framework to develop workshops and educational resources to help the region better prepare for a spectrum of disasters, particularly wildfires.
• Casa del Sur/Encuentro in Santa Fe, Argentina, will focus on building resiliency awareness among vulnerable citizens, who have been affected by both record floods and record lows of the Paraná River, urban heat, and fires in the past two decades.
• A team from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, will develop a framework for rural communities to plan for and adapt to sea level rise flooding and increased storm flooding impacts, using rural Virginia as the target audience and a special emphasis on nature-based features.
• A team from the Urban Mapping Agency, BuroDAP, and Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia, will conduct XSP workshops with a special focus on vulnerable communities and informal settlements facing flood risk in the urban peripheries of two major cities—Policarpa in Cartagena, and the Tunjuelo River floodplain in Bogotá.

All five projects, scheduled to be completed by May 2025, were selected as part of an annual RFP process managed by the Consortium for Scenario Planning. Past projects have focused on housing affordability (2023), changing food systems (2022), climate strategies (2021), and equity and low-growth scenarios (2020).

To learn more about all Lincoln Institute RFPs, fellowships, and research opportunities, visit the research and data section of our website.

Jon Gorey is staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A member of the Coast Guard inspects flooding in Beaumont, Texas, as part of a search and rescue mission after Hurricane Harvey. Credit: Petty Officer 3rd Class Brandon Giles/US Coast Guard/US Department of Defense.