ARTÍCULO 1043. CUMPLIMIENTO DE OBLIGACIONES A CARGO DEL

Historically urbanisation in Africa was largely linked to the direct contact with the industrial west during the colonial era (Davis, 1955) when the colonizing nations were in search of suitable settlements for political and economic purposes. However, since independence in the late 1950s to early 1960s, urbanisation has been driven by several factors which can be grouped into intra-urban and extra-urban factors. Specific intra-urban factors contributing to the rapid rise of SSA urban population (and to a less extent in rural population) include: high fertility rate, increased life expectancy, cultural aspects in some areas where having many children, early marriages among others.

Population growth rate developing countries is generally higher than those of developed world. Even when fertility rates were reported to have declined in most parts of the world in the 1980s, there was a little or insignificant decline in most SSA countries. In fact, recent findings have indicated that the rate of fertility decline that was realised in the 1980s has slowed since 1998 and thus remains the highest globally (Bongaarts, 2008).

Broadly speaking, urban population increase in Africa is linked to increased life expectancy (owing to improvement in health services). And specifically, it is partly attributed to a generally reduced child mortality rates across all countries in the continent. Curtailing of communicable diseases as a result of improved health services has lowered avoidable deaths. The absence of laws regulating family size in almost all SSA countries has also led to the rapid rise in

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population. Cultural aspects in some areas where having many children are promoted lead to rapid population growth rate. Early marriages, although it is generally improving, it is still common in SSA partly explains high population growth. High population growth rate means higher land fragmentation which leads to reduced farm size and thus reduced UPA.

The aforementioned factors generally influence both rural and urban population growth rate. However, by far the most important contributing factor to urban and peri-urban area population growth is the high rural-to-urban migration rate (Todaro, 1997, De Brauw et al., 2014).In addition, the areas of origin of several migrants to urban centres in Africa are hardly documented. As a result, migrants coming from secondary towns are often excluded in the assessment of rural-to-urban migration. For instance, between 1998 and 1992 net negative annual migration rates at national level were −0.2% for Niger, −0.9% for Senegal and −1.6 % for Côte d’Ivoire, whereas all the big cities in these countries had positive net migration in the same period (Potts, 2009). Beauchemin and Bocquier (2004) observed that many migrants leave secondary towns for big cities, which is usually neglected by many studies. This implies that in order to get a clearer picture of the urban grow rate due to migration, big and small cities should be assessed independently. Moreover, studies have adduced that, unlike in the developed world where forces (e.g., good jobs and improved health services) attract people to urban areas, in SSA forces such as civil wars and internal conflicts, disease epidemics, poverty, unemployment, and unequal opportunities tend to push people from rural areas to urban centres (Beauchemin and Bocquier, 2004, Njoh, 2003). Moreover, the imbalance in the distribution of facilities has created a clear contrast between rural and urban centres contributing to the accelerated rates of rural-to-urban immigration.

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In buttressing the point above, estimates show that the rural-to-urban migration accounted for roughly half of the urban growth in many Africa countries between 1960 and 1990 (Barrios et al., 2006). This is because the rural-to-urban migration played a major role in the socioeconomic growth during the post-independence period, especially in countries such as Uganda, Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Liberia; however some authors opined that this push to urban centres was caused more by civil conflicts than by other aforementioned push forces (Potts, 1995, Adepoju, 2000, Brockerhoff and Eu, 1993). For example between 1984 and 2011, of the top ten armed conflicts in the world (which recorded more than 1,000 deaths and with thousands more displaced) eight were located in Africa (ACLED, 2016). The situation does not seem to have improved as the most recent report indicates: 8 out of 9 countries in Africa where armed conflicts were reported are in SSA (ACLED, 2017). Yet in countries where conflict is non-existent, the rural-to-urban migration continues unabated because of the attraction of low-paid informal work in the cities (Potts, 2009). Significantly, the informal economic sector employs 65–80% of the urban population and plays a key role in receiving and integrating migrants into urban areas by providing them with the minimum means of subsistence (Beauchemin and Bocquier, 2004).

These factors lead to increased population pressure in urban and peri-urban areas. According to Seto et al. (2011), while over 43% of the total urban land expansion in Africa could be attributed to population growth, in Europe, China and North America it is only 4%, 18% and 28%, respectively. Conversely, GDP per capita growth rate as a driving factor in Africa is non- significant compared to 86% for Europe and 72% for North America (Table 2.1). This difference is an important socio-economic element causal to the increased number of urban poor in SSA

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and preponderance of urban slums in big cities, even though their growing number of urban slums have made SSA the fastest urbanizing region in the world.