Financing ICT and digitalisation in Africa: Current trends and key sustainability issues

Increasingly recognised as a pivotal infrastructure for inclusive economic development and social justice in Africa, information and communication technology is a fundamental component of the continent’s infrastructure budget. DFIs, such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank, have long included digital infrastructure and connectivity projects as one of the portfolios that receive financial support. Nevertheless, the investment landscape for sustainable information and communication technologies in Africa remains poorly understood. The availability of data is inconsistent, mirroring a broader knowledge problem across the entire infrastructure finance sector (see Cirolia, Pieterse & Pollio, 2022). Moreover, issues of sustainable investment are by nature of digital infrastructure much less visible and debated than in related sectors of mobility or energy. This paper is, therefore, aimed at i) highlighting the different components of infrastructure investment in information and communication technologies, ii) showing that the value chain is complex and that different investment patterns and bottlenecks need to be recognised across the sector, and iii) identifying key sustainability issues that deserve attention for digital infrastructure as much as for other types of technical systems. To do so, in this paper, four sections and a tentative list of policy implications linking sustainability concerns to the financial design of information and communication technology infrastructure are featured

Accounting for the C/city: analyzing Kisumu's fiscal configurations

Urban public finance is a hidden force shaping cities and their development. This thesis draws attention to the powerful insights which can be gained from studying cities through a fiscal lens. It argues for an interdisciplinary and relational approach which infuses the fiscal study of cities with political and social interpretations of urban dynamics. Accounting for the city through two very different registers, this thesis draws from urban public finance and from critical scholarship on urban infrastructure. The conventional urban public finance literature is largely technical, produced by urban policy and fiscal experts. In contrast, social and political theorization on urban infrastructure provides a critical reading of the technicist approach and contributes to the refinement of key theoretical concepts within urban studies. There are many incommensurabilities between these two scholarly registers. They have different framings of politics, technical knowledge, and the priorities for change. However, there are several shared interests. They are both concerned with urban institutions, urban places, and the necessity for change. These shared interests provide the foundation for a revised approach to the fiscal study of cities. This synthetic approach is spelled out in a series of conceptual and methodological propositions. The first proposition is the device of the C/city, which distinguishes between an urban settlement (the small ccity) and its governing authorities (the big-C City). The C/city device foregrounds the importance of the city, the City, and the fiscal relationships which operate at the intersections between them. The second proposition frames urban public finance not just as a means of financing urban infrastructure but as an infrastructure itself. Drawing from the infrastructure scholarship, the concept of 'configurations’ is deployed creatively to trace fiscal histories, instruments, and relationships. The third proposition is the importance of grounding inquiry in particular places. To address this, the case study method is used. The case method allows for the use of a variety of types of data and analytical tools, grounded in contextualized experiences. The fourth proposition presents Kisumu, a secondary city in Kenya, as an exemplary case for exploring fiscal C/city configurations. Kisumu provides a useful case for wider generalization precisely because it is an ordinary (African) city. Not only is Kisumu on the margins of Western theorization, its unsensational nature also excludes it from dominant discourses on African cities. However, historically, administratively, and politically, Kisumu has many parallels with smaller urban centers in British East Africa and beyond. It provides a fascinating and widely relevant case of the differentiated nature of fiscal decentralization processes and dynamics. There is much which can be learned from Kisumu and its fiscal story. The bulk of this thesis is dedicated to unpacking the Kisumu case. First, there is a focus on the City. This includes tracing the historical development of Kisumu’s urban institutions and unpacking the ways in which the contemporary City shapes and is shaped by public finance. This is followed by a deeper exploration of particular city infrastructures and their fiscal configurations. The fiscal configurations related to property rates, the corporatized water utility company, and transport finance are traced and exposed. The Kisumu case provides a series of valuable insights. First, it demonstrates the potential and limitations of conventional fiscal analysis. The limitations posed by accounting are particularly important in the context of Kisumu, where the C/city has many misalignments. Second, it makes the case for reading public finance as an urban infrastructure. The process of tracing fiscal configurations illuminates the social, political, material and technical dimensions of public finance. Third, it draws attention to the de facto challenges and complexities related to decentralization (and in fact, the unique recentralization which Kenya has undergone). This includes how the sub-national urban state is constructed and deconstructed, over time and in complex ways. Fourth, it foregrounds the fiscal functionaries whose practices shape the everyday operations of the public finance system. These actors shape fiscal configurations. However, they are often hidden in conventional fiscal analyses. Fifth, it reads the practices of fiscal functionaries as a micro-politics of the state. The heterogeneity of the state and multidimensional nature of power are foregrounded. Finally, the case highlights the challenge of urban infrastructure finance in the context of a post-networked city. It shows the necessity of moving beyond common academic and policy tropes related to infrastructure and services. Collectively, these insights provide a compelling case for urban studies to more deeply engage with the fiscal C/city, in Africa and beyond

Apportioned city: gendered delineations of asylum, work and violence in Cape Town

This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town’s segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps onto urban apportionment we reveal how an ecology of violence – of spatialised segregation, xenophobia and sexual violence – establishes a corporeal power that constrains access to the city. Crucially, these women deploy counter practices of apportionment and their precisely attuned navigations add to our understanding of the agile repertoires of working the city

Infrastructure financing in Africa: Overview, research gaps, and urban research agenda

Africa’s development requires substantial investment in infrastructure systems, such as water, energy and telecommunications. These systems are essential in ensuring that contemporary processes, such as industrialisation and urbanisation, can be leveraged to create real and sustained value for cities, countries, regions and global networks. One of the key questions underpinning this infrastructure challenge is how to finance these systems. Often focussing on the need for bankable projects and creditworthy institutions, debates about how to finance African infrastructure reflect an important and well-rehearsed argument that the key to addressing the infrastructure finance gap, thereby unlocking Africa’s infrastructure challenge, is overcoming the mismatch between investor expectations and the actual risk/return profile of infrastructure programmes and projects. In this mismatch, many useful projects are regarded as simply unbankable, either as short-term returns are too low, or the risks are too high or not easily quantified and costed. With the sustainable development goals and other global agendas calling for more equality, climate responsiveness and poverty alleviation, the development sector has been compelled to move beyond the frame of bankability to ensure that investments are sustainable and just. This has required deeper engagement with how financial logics, such as rating systems and assessment criteria, shape the sustainability of infrastructural outcomes. It has also required recognising current gaps in knowledge, such as the lack of data on Africa and the weaknesses in our ability to analyse this data in the context of rapid urbanisation, digitisation, demographic transition and other important trends that have unique implications for the continent. This paper comprises four parts with the intention of demonstrating these gaps and providing a scaffolding for future knowledge production. In section 2, an overview is given of the actors and instruments involved in infrastructure finance in Africa, namely how much different actors are investing, what kinds of financial mechanisms are being used, and into what types of infrastructure sectors. In section 3, the research issues that surface when attempting to analyse that data are outlined, with an indication of where improvements could be made to strengthen documentation and accountability. Building on the insights from section 2 and 3, in section 4, a propositional and forward-thinking research agenda for infrastructure finance research in Africa is presented. The paper is concluded by a presentation of two key areas for collective action

Algorithmic Suturing: Platforms, Motorcycles and the ‘Last Mile’ in Urban Africa

The ‘last mile’ is not only a powerful metaphor of contemporary life, but also thetangible site of a challenge, whether for governments wanting to reach their citizens orcompanies wanting to reach their customers. In urban Africa this challenge is compoundedby the fragmented material condition of cities. As a result, a growing number of techcompanies have been compelled by the possibility of creating digital platforms thataddress the unique logistical configurations of African cities, often enrolling informalsystems such as motorcycle taxis to address spatial and economic fragmentation. Throughthe perspective of three Nairobi-based startups that incorporate motorcycle taxis intotheir last-mile platforms, this article illustrates how processes of ‘algorithmic suturing’knit together the loose ends of splintered urban networks thanks to platform businessmodels that visualize the last mile as a site of optimization. In parallel with commonunderstandings of suturing within African infrastructure debates which foregroundmakeshift practices of the urban poor, this article argues that algorithmic suturing is aspeculative endeavour through which urban fractures are made legible as sites of value.By stitching together city fragments, these platforms envision large data-driven urbaneconomies which interface with informal mobility networks and the shifting urbandemographic of the lower-middle class

Infrastructure governance in the post-networked city: state-led, high-tech sanitation in Addis Ababa’s condominium housing

Ethiopia’s mass-scale subsidized housing delivery programme has driven the rapid expansion of middle-income, mid-rise settlements on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, requiring the provision of infrastructure to newly developed areas. In the case of the Kotari housing project, established sanitation systems were deemed inappropriate for the site, resulting in the deployment of novel technology, a Membrane Bioreactor (MBR). Such decentralised technologies contribute to the heterogenous infrastructure configurations which characterise Addis Ababa’s sanitation landscape, reflected not only in material configurations but also in how they are governed. In this paper, we use the concept of ‘infrastructure interfaces’ as an analytical device to identify the key material connection points in the system. Working across scales, we scrutinise the governance arrangements at these critical junctures: the household, the block, the condominium, and the city. Our analysis challenges established understandings of infrastructural heterogeneity driven by the private sector, either through financialized elite infrastructures or informal survivalist practices. In Kotari, the state is the driver and the target is the lower middle class. Centring the state in these infrastructure configurations provides nuance to our understanding of how heterogeneity emerges. Our methodological approach accounts for governance at various scales, providing fresh insights into the relationality of infrastructure, particularly the human/technology interface and infrastructural failures. The case shows the importance of transcending binary readings of infrastructure configurations, such as on/off grid, state/private and formal/informal. Future work on the post-network city must go beyond simply denigrating or valorising alternative modes of service delivery

Platform Politics and Silicon Savannahs: Fintech and the platformed motorcycle: speculating on ordinary mobility economies in urban Africa

Despite the economic challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, venture capital (VC) investments in African startups have remained resilient, surpassing $5 billion in 2021 and experiencing a staggering 264% growth compared to the previous year. Notably, more than 60% of these investments were directed towards fintech companies. The surge in fintech investments in Africa is driven by several factors that make the continent an attractive market. Africa still has a large unbanked population, presenting an opportunity for financial services that offer alternatives to traditional banking methods. The rise of mobile money and cryptocurrencies has brought accessible financial solutions to individuals and informal businesses without access to traditional banking systems. Furthermore, Africa has emerged as a significant market for cryptocurrency trading, providing alternative options in volatile monetary climates and facilitating cross-border transactions. The report draws on empirical research in three case-study cities – Cape Town (South Africa), Kigali (Rwanda), and Nairobi (Kenya) – to showcase some important trends at the interface of fintech and the platformisation of motorcycle economies in urban Africa. It builds on the insight that fintech is not ‘just’ facilitated by digital platforms, but it deploys the same business logics of intermediation and, in doing so, is often part of platformisation itself (Langley and Leyshon, 2021). More specifically, the report shows the importance of the financial-inclusion thrust in linking fintech to two-wheel paratransit, as well as the multiple ways in which digital platforms create new financial pathways in rapport to the physical commodity of the motorcycle; the crucial importance of payment gateways as infrastructures of additional data-driven financial innovation; the promises of risk-management through data and the pilot-based experimental practices through which these promises are given effect; and linkages to the decarbonisation of mobility systems in African cities. For each of these points, the report highlights key policy implications that will require careful attention by researchers, regulators, and private actors in the field

Urban statecraft: The governance of transport infrastructures in African cities

Through the lens of infrastructure governance, this article explores the configurations and operations of the urban state in sub-Saharan Africa. We deploy and extend the concept of ‘statecraft’, drawing on the recent scholarship within urban studies which explores city and municipal statecraft. Consolidating insights across several studies on transport governance in African cities, we identify three ‘sites’ of urban statecraft evident in urban Africa. First, we look at sectoral authorities, which we analyse through the common experience of ringfenced national road agencies. Carving off urban functions can fragment power over urban infrastructure. Second, we look at metropolitan authorities, which we analyse through bus rapid transit (BRT) agencies. Metropolitanisation crafts new scales of governance in Africa’s larger cities. Finally, we turn to the regulation of informal service delivery systems, which we analyse through popular transport regulation. The regulation of minibus and motorcycle taxis shows the central importance of everyday practice in urban statecraft in Africa. The case of transport governance provides a particularly vivid display of the institutional fragmentation that exists between state agencies and institutions in African cities. In this context, the urban state is not a static municipal entity, but is enacted through complex and multi-scalar relationships. These relationships relate not only to the assignment of functions or territorial design, but also to the practices which animate infrastructural systems. More generally, we argue that there is ample scope within the African urban governance debates for deeper interrogation of statecraft

From problematisation to propositionality: advancing southern urban infrastructure debates

In this article, we explore the notion of propositionality to advance southern urban infrastructure debates towards more anticipatory forms of scholarship. By propositionality, we mean a research sensibility that engages, first and foremost, with propositions for infrastructure futures on their own terms. While scholarship on infrastructures in southern cities has contributed to very fruitful conceptual and methodological innovations, we argue that the current mode of problematisation does not lend itself to this propositional intent. Conceptually focused on deconstruction and critique and methodologically tied to heterogeneity at the community scale, this form of problematisation tends to produce localised knowledge about what is, but offers limited avenues for articulating what could be. After a brief introduction, the article provides a review of the main conceptual and methodological contributions and limitations of the dominant modes of researching southern urban infrastructure. We then explore a different mode of problematisation as the first step towards a propositional research sensibility, followed by an overview of a preliminary propositional skill set covering three aspects: mobilising technical knowledge more effectively; appreciating sectoral and scalar specificity; and addressing the challenges of normativity. Our arguments draw on literature from southern scholarship, science and technology studies (STS), and pragmatism, as well as empirical work conducted by ourselves and others. We conclude the article with a call for further reflection among southern urban scholars on ways to move us into a propositional space that better engages with the people and things we speak for and care about