RURBANAFRICA

African Rural-City Connections

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The overall objective of the African Rural-City Connections (RurbanAfrica) project is to explore the connections between rural transformations, mobility, and urbanization processes and analyze how these contribute to an understanding of the scale, nature and location of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The RurbanAfrica project will advance the research agenda on rural-city connections in sub-Saharan Africa by addressing a range of crucial components: agricultural transformations, rural livelihoods, city dynamics, and access to services in cities. In this respect the project will challenge a number of generally accepted ‘truths’ about rural and city development, and the importance and implication of migration in shaping these. It will thereby question the overall negative interpretations of the economic role of rural-urban mobility and migration in sub-Saharan Africa and generate new insights into the relationship between rural-city connections and poverty dynamics. The project will include nine partners; four European, one international, and four sub-Saharan African. RurbanAfrica focuses on four country cases: Rwanda, Tanzania, Cameroon and Ghana and examine in-depth two rural-city connections in each of the case countries. Research is organized into six work packages: Agricultural transformation, rural livelihoods, city dynamics, access to services, knowledge platform and policy dialogue, and synthesis, dissemination and management. Central to the approach is the on-going integration of policy research, policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and empirical research. Through ongoing collaboration between senior and junior researchers from European and sub-Saharan African partners, and co-supervising of PhD students, the project will contribute to capacity building and potentially impact curriculum development. The research and dissemination process will be supported by a scientific advisory board, with members from European and sub-Saharan African research institutions.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

African policymakers assume that urbanisation negatively impacts growth and increases poverty, but research shows that this may not be the case.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

The EU-funded project 'African rural-city connections' (http://geo.ku.dk/rurbanafrica/ (RURBANAFRICA)) explores the assumption that African urbanisation is increasing poverty and challenging economic growth.

The project is conducting case studies of the four sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries of Cameroon, Ghana, Rwanda and Tanzania to test the hypothesis.Through the case studies, researchers examine the relationship between rural transformations, mobility and urbanisation.

Finally, they look at how these key themes relate to poverty in SSA.Running since 2012, RURBANAFRICA's initial findings show similar trends in agricultural developments and policies across Cameroon, Ghana and Tanzania.

However, trends in urbanisation in these countries over the same time period are much more variable.

RURBANAFRICA proposes that different colonial and post-colonial approaches in each country may account for the variance.

The results have also shown that the role that migration from rural to urban areas plays in strategies to sustain rural areas is unclear.

Due to the limited availability of research on the relationship between migration and urbanisation, more work needs to be done.At the end of the project, researchers hope to ultimately answer how urbanisation is connected to the increase and decrease of poverty levels.

Additionally, RURBANAFRICA will have connected and engaged various actors and stakeholders in a cross-sectoral policy dialogue.