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The African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) on Tuesday announced plans to help the lowest income earners living in informal settlements in Maiduguri to secure land titles.
Prof. Diana Mitlin, the ACRC’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), made this known while speaking on catalysing reforms in 12 African cities, Nigeria inclusive at media parley in Maiduguri.
“56 per cent of Africa’s urban population live in informal settlements.
“So there is recognition of the need to think about the needs of that group,” Diana, a professor of global urbanism at the University of Manchester United Kingdom (UK) said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the people living in informal settlements constituted two third of the Maiduguri’s population, according to the ACRC’s findings.
NAN reports that ACRC is funded by the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) as part of the UK’s Aid on African cities.
The African Cities participating in the project were Lagos and Maiduguri in Nigeria; Accra in Ghana; Bukavu in Democratic Republic of Congo; Dar es Salaam in Tanzania; Freetown in Sierra Leone; Harare in Zimbabwe; Kampala in Uganda; Khartoum in Sudan; Lilongwe in Malawi, Mogadishu in Somalia and Nairobi in Kenya.
“There is also realisation that many people in the urban areas have come to the cities and the cities were unprepared for them. They lived informally, they have insecure tenure and prequently very limited access to the basic services that are essential for good health, and for economic prosperity.
“So when people are living at low density there is less need for public services,” Diana said.
According to her, as residental density increases people need to have access to good water, sanitation, roads, houses, drainage to manage flood waters and reliable energy for many economic activities to take place.
“So there is recognition that the challenge of the informal neighbourhoods is very considerable.
“There may be low-income people living in formal areas and many economic activities are also informal and poorly connected to the more formal businesses growing rapidly.
“So there was recognition that the contest demanded that FCDO understand better how to work in these areas. There is also greater recognition among local and national governments of the importance and the opportunity for urban development.
“The new urban agenda from 2016, the inhabitants really want to get the national governments to recognise the urban areas potential and to think more directly how to support work in that area. So this is basically the background on what we are trying to do,” the ACRC’s CEO explained.
She said that the Maiduguri’s project as it were essentially centred on improving the lives of the lowest income, most vulnerable and most disadvantaged residents.
Diana said that the ACRC was looking at ways in which the NGOs, the academics, the professionals and the media groups come together to analysed “what needs to happen, to identify solutions and articulate an argument about what needs to change and how it needs to change.”
“We began the work in 12 cities and Maiduguri was one of those cities.
“So we are really trying to think about how can we understand the problems, how can we understand the challenges that exists, synteresising what goes wrong already and understanding from key stakeholders what they see as catalytic in terms of moving forward.
“We are now in the implementation phase. We have two projects going on in Maiduguri. We are looking at land titling and we working on how to make land titling more effective.
“How do address the security needs of some of the vulnerable groups in the city,” the ACRC’s CEO said.
Also contributing, Prof. Abubakar Monguno, one of the ACRC’s lead researchers from University of Maiduguri, said they were working with Borno government to make sure that they achieved the purposes for which FCDO had planned that urban growth and development continued in a way it should be.
Monguno said the Maiduguri uptake which drew community representatives, academic researchers, professionals and civil society actors was trying to help and achieve the ACRC’s agenda in Maiduguri’s project called “Systematic Land Titling”.
“This is why we are now coming in as a team of experts to help to push this agenda forward for people to take up this land titling,” he said. (NAN)
E.A
Feb. 4, 2025
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