Taking the US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa to the Next Step: Secondary Cities in the Western Sahel

With a growing and youthful population, much of the world is looking to Africa to fill human resource gaps and provide innovative solutions for global challenges. Indeed, the Biden administration’s ambitious US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa included an intriguing element in outlining its approach for implementing a vision that better accounts for Africa’s pivotal role in the world. The strategy, released in August 2022, declared that the United States would “rebalance toward urban hubs.” The idea was to “help African cities plan for their growth in critical sectors like energy access, climate change, adaptation, transportation, and water and waste management,” and to recommit to “subnational capacity building,” among other objectives.

Just a year later, one such project that had already been in the works came to fruition: a $60 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact for urban connectivity with Nairobi, Kenya, in 2023. It marked the first time the institution had sealed such an agreement with a subnational entity rather than a country. Other observers before and since have long called for US engagement to go even further by extending to Africa’s rapidly growing “secondary cities,” those beyond the obvious political and financial capitals, and beyond the biggest urban centers. The Cities Alliance estimated in 2022 that Africa has about 885 secondary cities with populations of more than 100,000 people. In total, they account for 180-200 million people.

Growing cities in the Western Sahel present opportunities to experiment, for example, with new infrastructure models to address both rising demand and emergent risks.

The US government is heeding that development to a certain extent, preparing to engage more with such subnational urban areas of Africa. The recent establishment of an office of subnational diplomacy within the State Department is an important signal to prioritize this kind of connection. But for the most part, such investment, trade, and other initiatives focus on areas of Africa perceived to be calm and predictable. The US must take the next—and potentially even more productive—step: engage similarly with secondary cities in the Western Sahel.

The Western Sahel, a region in this case referring to the stretch of countries from Senegal and Mauritania on the West Coast through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, parts of northern Nigeria, and Chad, suffers from a distinct image problem in relation to US economic and development assistance. Long the focus of billions of dollars in US military aid and direct involvement for countering terrorism (until recent coups upturned that cooperation), the Western Sahel has been relatively neglected for serious, large-scale US attention that isn’t dominated by issues related to terrorism.

The perception of Africa—and the Western Sahel in particular—of being largely rural outside its biggest cities neglects the unique and important way that all of Africa’s cities are growing. Africa is a huge untapped market, and secondary cities are a cheaper investment, better connected to urban areas, and have great potential for expansion. And while much of the growth in cities will be driven by voluntary and involuntary migrants with limited urban job skills (especially in the Western Sahel’s secondary cities), the Western Sahel’s growing urban populations have been underserved and are a significant untapped market. This unmet demand provides clear opportunities for business growth and the development of new models to break from the status quo. Yet, this subset of the population is often not the target of urban infrastructure development projects.

Growing cities in the Western Sahel present opportunities to experiment, for example, with new infrastructure models to address both rising demand and emergent risks. The region’s secondary cities are centers of resilience, with varying socioeconomic strengths, even in the face of violence elsewhere in those countries that is driving displaced people to the cities. These cities provide a place of refuge for the forcibly displaced, even within the unstable Western Sahel, creating a kind of backup for larger urban areas where infrastructure is already strained.

The growth of secondary cities in the Western Sahel also offers tremendous opportunities to develop new models of social, economic, environmental, and political development, and to address critical challenges in the region such as digital transformation and climate change. Interventions could be differentiated based on the specific needs of a city or town. For instance, depending on a city’s urban structure, investments could focus on expanding the city or consolidating its neighborhoods, depending on growth patterns.

While infrastructure provides the foundation, it’s the people who bring a city to life. Their cultures, traditions, interactions, and daily activities create the unique character and vibrancy of a city.

Different cities will have different economic structures and unique potential. Cities such as Maradi, the second-largest city in Niger, for example, may require investment in trade and transportation-related sectors, such as banking, communication, and hospitality, while Sikasso, in southern Mali, may require investments in specific agricultural value chains. Other cities may require investments to improve quality of life and human capital.

Of course, cities are much more than just infrastructure. While infrastructure provides the foundation, it’s the people who bring a city to life. Their cultures, traditions, interactions, and daily activities create the unique character and vibrancy of a city.

Recent and ongoing human displacement has both forced and inspired a degree of social inclusion in the Western Sahel’s secondary cities, but signs of stigmatization toward specific groups of displaced people are emerging, and there is a lack of confidence in government’s ability to provide security and justice.

So, investments in developing secondary cities also must prioritize building local government capacity. Local government is key to successful development as their sheer proximity to the people means they play the main role in building the social contract between communities and the national government.

Any stepped-up engagement must always be cognizant that instability is caused by different factors and requires different interventions. For example, instability resulting from an influx of refugees or internally displaced people would require different solutions from those areas where it is attributed to climate disruptions.

Indeed, in announcing the new strategy in 2022, the White House made a point of noting the potential difficulties in implementing its vision for Sub-Saharan Africa. “We acknowledge that Africa’s potential will continue to be challenged as long as deadly conflicts divide societies, corruption impedes economic progress, food insecurity heightens the risk of famine and malnutrition, and repression stifles human rights and democratic expression.”

Certainly, those are issues most often associated with the Western Sahel currently. But they should not wholly define the region so much that it is relegated to neglect in global development. On the contrary, its resilience—and that of its burgeoning secondary cities—in the face of such challenges, makes it ripe for new and constructive attention from donors and investors.

Oge Onubogu is the director of the Wilson Center’s Africa Program.

Cover photo by Mab.Black/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.