The Africa Urban Lab Podcast

Our guest is Mark Roberts — Lead Urban Economist at the World Bank and a lead author of the Bank’s new flagship report, Sub-Saharan Africa’s Urban Awakening: Catalyzing Economic Growth and Job Creation, to which the Africa Urban Lab contributed. We discuss why fast-growing African cities do not automatically become productive ones, exploring what it takes to turn rapid urbanization into economic growth and job creation. It’s a conversation about the policies, investments, and institutions needed to unlock the economic potential of Africa’s cities.

Our guest is Ken Opalo — Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a leading voice on African political economy and development. We discuss what it will take to unleash African economic growth, exploring in particular the institutions, political choices, and state capacity needed to turn Africa’s demographic and urban transition into broad-based prosperity.

Our guest is Daniel Yu — Founding Partner of the Africa Jobs Fund and Founder of Wasoko. We discuss the Africa Jobs Fund's two main areas of focus, in particular export manufacturing and international labor mobility. We also discuss economic growth more broadly, urbanization, and the drivers of structural transformation.

Our guest is Stefan Dercon — Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford and former Chief Economist at the UK’s Department for International Development (now FCDO). We discuss what it takes for cities and countries to kickstart economic growth, exploring in particular Stefan’s recent work operationalizing elite bargains in the real world. It’s a grounded conversation on why growth and development depend not only on planning and policy, but on the politics that make growth possible.

Our guest is Astrid Haas — urban economist and one of the leading voices on municipal finance in African cities, whose advisory work spans mayors and finance ministers from across the continent. We dig into the central question facing African cities: how should they pay for themselves? The conversation covers why property taxes remain so underused despite their potential, how cities can move beyond donor dependency to build genuine fiscal capacity, and what the rest of the continent can learn from Freetown's recent reform experience. It's a grounded look at the unglamorous but essential work of making African urbanization financially viable. Here's a link to Astrid Haas' co-authored AfDB report "From Millions to Billions: Financing the Development of African Cities" (upon which this episode's conversation is based) https://www.afdb.org/en/documents/millions-billions-financing-development-african-cities

Our first guest is Joe Studwell — development scholar and author of the landmark How Asia Works — who has just published his long-awaited follow-up book, How Africa Works. We dig into the book's central arguments: why dense cities are essential to building functional markets, how urbanization can actually boost agricultural productivity, and why population density is the key to affordable infrastructure at scale. It's a conversation that challenges some persistent assumptions about African development. Enjoy the show.