LUSAKA ranks among the lowest cities in Africa in terms of infrastructure development and advancement, according to a Pricewaterhouse Coopers 2015 report. Of the 20 African cities surveyed, Lusaka ranks number 14, scoring 74, ahead of Accra, Kampala, Maputo, Dar es Salaam, Kinshasa and Luanda. According to PWC’s March 2015 “Into Africa:
The Continent’s Cities of Opportunity” index, Cairo tops the rankings and scored the highest in terms of infrastructure development at 137, followed closely behind by Tunis on 134. Addis Ababa and Johannesburg completed the top four at 112 and 107 respectively. The data is compiled through various factors including ratings on cost of housing, airport connectivity, communications, road safety, water risk and power, among others.
“No city can develop effective highways, railroads, housing, energy, water and waste resources without the resources to fund development,” PwC report stated.
“It’s not surprising, therefore, that Cairo and Tunis rank number one and two, respectively, in this indicator - or that the top five is filled out by Addis Ababa at number three, Johannesburg at four, and Casablanca at five. The latter cities, like Cairo and Tunis, go back well over a thousand years. A younger Johannesburg has always been, as we wrote, a municipal centre extremely focused on the quality of its infrastructural network and backed by wealth from its rich mining resources.”
The purpose of the analysis is to facilitate the decisions and actions of both investors and policy makers. According to PwC, infrastructure investment needed to expand and Africa’s cities could maintain their current levels of growth without enhancing their infrastructure. “The World Bank estimates that while sub-Saharan Africa needs infrastructure investment of nearly $100 billion annually, it currently gets less than half of that,” it stated.
And PwC stated that urbanisation and demographic changes were some of the global trends to drive growth opportunities in the real estate industry across Africa over the next five years. PwC Africa real estate leader, Ilse French, stated that a number of economic activities across the globe were responsible for rapid growth in the real estate industry in most African countries like Zambia. Zambia’s real estate industry has great investment potential as it offers a housing deficit of about three million, a huge market that needs to be filled by new investors. A minimum of 150,000 houses need to be built in Zambia annually to meet a housing deficit of 1.3 million in urban locations and 1.5 million in rural areas, according to Habitat for Humanity. (The Post Newspaper)
