Urban Resilience Building in Fast-growing African Cities

Small- and medium-sized cities and towns in sub-Saharan Africa are growing fast and accumulating risks. Local governments seek to build the resilience of their city in conditions of complex interdependent urban systems and gaps in data and information. Technical and financial capacity issues often lead to them resorting to external expertise, which shifts the decision-making power away from the citizenry and elected leaders. To capacitate cities to lead their own resilience-building processes, new decision-support tools are required that can operate on data that are good enough and can enhance inclusive decision-making processes and local ownership. This briefing draws from the experience of the City Resilience Action Planning (CityRAP) Tool developed by UN-Habitat, including within the Urban Africa Risk Knowledge (Urban ARK) programme. The tool was implemented in 20 cities spread over nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 2015 and 2018.