YIMBY movement for African cities

Description of proposed project

In 2024, a new university -- the African School of Economics-Zanzibar (ASE-Z) -- was established through a joint partnership between the Charter Cities Institute and the African School of Economics. Last year, ASE-Z welcomed the university’s first students via a Diploma program in Urban Development at the Africa Urban Lab (AUL). The AUL is the first research center at ASE-Z, focused on identifying and scaling tractable policy solutions to rapid urbanization across the continent. This work was done with the support of a 2024 ACX Grant, as well as several other funders. This grant round, the Africa Urban Lab is requesting an ACX Grant to support the AUL’s educational and policy implementation work which aims to ensure Africa’s rapid urbanization bolsters human flourishing.

As the inaugural research center at ASE-Z, the Africa Urban Lab’s urbanization work focuses on three main activities: (i) education, (ii) research, and (iii) policy implementation. First, on education, the AUL’s Diploma in Urban Development enrolled 38 students starting in November 2024, and graduated 30 of these Diploma students in May 2025. The cohort included African mayors, a deputy mayor, a Senior Director of Kenya’s Ministry of Lands, Housing, & Urban Development, as well as many urban planners working in cities across the continent (cohort details here: https://www.aul.city/blog/empowering-leaders-building-cities-meet-the-aul-s-inaugural-cohort). We aim to ~double the enrollment (~60-70 students) for the second Diploma cohort (and we’re on track to do this as we just closed admissions for the second cohort, and received slightly over double the number of applicants from our first cohort). In successive years, we aim to further grow the Diploma by potentially offering it twice per year, offering it online, and/or taking the Diploma ‘on the road’ where we deliver tailored, bespoke components of the Diploma to whole urban agencies at the direct request of African city leaders (requests which the AUL has had to turn down thus far due to lack of funds). Additionally, on the education front, the AUL is in conversations with the director-in-charge at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras-Zanzibar (IITM-Z) Campus (our neighbors here in Fumba Town, Zanzibar), Prof Preeti Aghalayam, to launch a joint Masters degree in Urban Economics & City Engineering offered by ASE-Zanzibar and IITM-Z. To effectively accomplish doubling enrollment for the second cohort, further growing the Diploma in subsequent years, and beginning to plan for a joint Masters degree, the AUL needs to bring on additional staff as well as pay for additional travel to/from Zanzibar. The ACX Grant would cover some of this additional staffing and travel required to accomplish these educational goals.

Second, on research, the AUL currently focuses on four priority research clusters (see https://www.aul.city/research). Given this ACX Grant isn’t asking for research support, I don’t go into detail on this.

Third, on policy implementation, the AUL aims to bring a YIMBY movement to Africa through supporting cities to implement urban policies that (i) have proven to have a high-impact, (ii) that have been effectively scaled across cities in other low-income African contexts, and (iii) that enable African cities to build the much-needed urban infrastructure required to accommodate the incoming ~900 million new urban residents by 2050. The three policy interventions the AUL is focusing on for implementation support are written about in more detail in my recent Asterisk essay (here: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/yes-in-my-bamako-yard). First, the AUL is supporting city governments to implement urban expansion planning to proactively build road-grids in advance of urban settlement on the periphery of fast-growing cities (see https://www.aul.city/uxp). Second, the AUL is actively fundraising to support the implementation/scaling of a proven satellite-based property/land tax system for cities, which leverages recent technological advances in satellite imagery and mobile payments to greatly simplify, streamline, and reduce the costs of administering a property/land tax system so that such a system is feasible in low-capacity African municipalities. Third, the AUL is leading a coalition of African universities – including Ardhi University in Tanzania, Kenyatta University in Kenya, and Makerere University in Uganda – to modernize urban planning curriculum so (i) it’s not 30 to 40 years out of date (as it is, on average, today) and (ii) so it integrates recent insights from urban economics a la Alain Bertaud (see https://www.aul.city/news/aul-launches-university-coalition-on-curricula-for-cities-uccc). The ACX Grant would partially cover program-related costs stemming from these three policy implementation activities, and in so doing support an African YIMBY movement.

Why are you qualified to work on this?

The Africa Urban Lab has an impressive track record for being in existence for just over one year. We’ve set up and incorporated ASE-Zanzibar here in Zanzibar; we also got our first Diploma program officially registered and accredited here in Zanzibar. We successfully delivered our first Diploma with a rockstar group of lecturers from the Marron Institute of Urban Management at NYU, the OECD, the International Growth Centre-Cities that Work, the University of Cape Town, and other reputable cities-focused orgs. We secured 225 submitted student applications, enrolled 38 students (including mayors and other urban leaders), graduated 30 students in May 2025, and – having closed admissions for the second Diploma cohort recently on August 1st, 2025 – have successfully doubled the number of applicants to 460 (putting us on track to hit our goal of doubling the number of students enrolled for the second cohort to ~60-70 students).

On our policy implementation work, the AUL has successfully launched two of our three policy programs – urban expansion planning (https://www.aul.city/uxp) and the University Coalition on Curricula for Cities (https://www.aul.city/news/aul-launches-university-coalition-on-curricula-for-cities-uccc). And we have the team in place and government buy-in secured for the launch of the urban finance program (set to implement an innovative, satellite-based property/land tax system first starting in Zanzibar City and then scaling to other cities across East Africa and beyond); we’re just awaiting successful fundraising in order to greenlight the urban finance program’s launch.

When it comes to the main factors that differentiate the AUL from other African cities-focused organizations on the continent (like the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town – https://www.africancentreforcities.net/; or the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos – https://chsdunilag.org/; or UN-Habitat), the AUL is hell-bent on much more tightly integrating ideas and recent insights from rigorous urban economics into everything we do. Other African cities-focused orgs are teaching slightly non-technical approaches to urbanization that often don’t equip future urban leaders and city policymakers with the mental models they require to make optimal, growth-enhancing urban policy decisions for their fast-growing cities. The AUL fills this void.

Another differentiator of the Africa Urban Lab and the African School of Economics-Zanzibar more generally, is that they play a pivotal role in the broader ambition of making Fumba Town a successful charter city here in Zanzibar. The AUL/ASE-Zanzibar (alongside our neighbors, IITM-Z, whose professors and staff all live in Fumba Town) serve as high-quality anchor tenants to the Fumba Town charter city project – attracting a young, talented, dynamic initial population to Fumba Town that is set to grow as these universities and their activities expand. This model could be replicated with other cities across Africa as Professor Leonard Wantchekon (Founder & President of ASE, and a Princeton University development economist) decides to scale to more ASE university campuses across the continent.

Finally, in our short, just-over-one-year in existence, the Africa Urban Lab has increasingly been recognized as an emerging thought leader and convenor in this important space of rapid African urbanization. Founder & Director, Kurtis Lockhart, spoke about the AUL’s work on the main stage at the Africa Urban Forum in Sept, 2024. In November, 2024 the AUL staff spoke at the World Urban Forum in Cairo about the promises and pitfalls of charter cities and new cities to help address rapid African urbanization. Both Kurtis Lockhart and AUL’s Urban Expansion lead, Patrick Lamson-Hall, spoke at the World Bank-IGC Urbanization & Development conference in Cape Town in June 2025. The AUL hosted a side conference at CCI’s New Cities Summit 2025 in Nairobi in June, with researchers and academics speaking on new cities, urban expansion planning, and innovative urban finance mechanisms. The AUL staff is contributing to several chapters of the upcoming World Bank Flagship Report on African urbanization (to be published in Spring 2026), and is co-convening along with the World Bank a series of consultative workshops across Africa to feed as input into the Flagship Report. And the AUL has hosted global thinkers on urbanization at our Public Talk series in Fumba Town, Zanzibar including Professor Alain Bertaud (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv-U0p89-_M) and others.

What would you do if not funded?

The most likely counterfactual scenario is that the launch of the joint Masters degree in Urban Economics & City Engineering is delayed by a year or two, and that the talented team members I (Kurtis) have gotten commitments from for the proposed Urban Finance program that I’m actively fundraising for potentially pursue other career opportunities (I have the implementers who implemented the innovative, satellite-based property/land tax system in Freetown, Sierra Leone – which quintupled city revenues there in ~3 fiscal years – on board to implement a similar system here in Zanzibar City. But we can’t greenlight until we have sufficient funding).

How much money do you need?

85000

Supporting documents

Asterisk essay on bringing a YIMBY movement to Africa by Kurtis Lockhart: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/yes-in-my-bamako-yard

Kurtis going over the AUL’s vision and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOqA116pAws&t=10s

Graduation ceremony from the AUL’s first Diploma cohort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EIyBDrUAuc

You can also see AUL’s “In the News” section of our website for more on recent partnerships and press releases (https://www.aul.city/news).