The Ethiopia Urban Expansion Initiative and knowledge exchange

Rapid urban expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa is a challenging policy problem with few demonstrated solutions. An approach for managing rapid urbanization resulted in considerable changes in planning strategies in cities in Ethiopia. An initiative from 2013 to 2016 created organizational capacities and capabilities. An external consultant facilitated knowledge exchange, but left the major planning activities to the public sector bodies. Local technical staff and political leaders were trained to create and implement plans for the next 30 years of urban growth in their cities. The paper describes the role of knowledge exchange in empowering local government officials to implement the approach. It outlines the approach itself and then describes the process of knowledge exchange and the challenges and successes that resulted.

Practice relevance

Urban planning and expansion require forethought as well as sustained effort for delivery over time. A successful intervention is presented together with a core factor of knowledge exchange. The role of the external consultant team was unusual: to provide a limited amount of input data and instead focus on guidance and advice. The significance of simple ideas is their ease of sharing amongst policymakers as a strategy for producing local ownership. Diffusion and dissemination of good ideas often stops after a single expensive and time-consuming pilot project, in part because complexity prevents the participants from attaining expertise to spread the idea without external support. Urban expansion planning is framed as an example of a planning approach that emphasized knowledge exchange. The conclusions could also apply to the development of any future planning techniques that depend on local implementation and uptake.