The Africa: Regional Urban Upgrading Initiative, financed in part by a grant from the Norwegian Trust Fund, is examining and selectively supporting urban upgrading programs in Sub-Saharan Africa through a variety of interventions. One component of the initiative focuses on distilling lessons from three decades of urban development and upgrading projects in the region. Specifically, the objective of this component is to assess what worked and what did not work in previous projects for upgrading low-income settlements in Africa, and to identify ways in which interventions aimed at delivering services to the poor can be better designed and targeted. As a first step, rapid assessment case studies were commissioned for five Anglophone countries (Ghana, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zambia) and five Francophone countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal). Each of these ten Country Assessment Reports provides an overview of the history of upgrading programs and policies in a given country and presents project or community specific case studies to identify lessons learned. Taken together, these ten reports offer insight  and diversity of upgrading approaches in Africa. This paper synthesizes and analyzes the main issues presented in the ten country reports. It highlights some of the challenges in and lessons learned about delivering services to the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In the World Bank’s first decade of urban sector lending (1972-82), one of the primary areas of intervention was the provision and improvement of housing for the urban poor. During these early years, the urban sector at the Bank supported discrete projects with an emphasis on affordability, cost recovery and replicability. In contrast to the era of slum clearance by national governments in the 1960s, the rise of the influential self-help paradigm in housing projects during the 1970s and 1980s was based on two types of approaches: the provision of sites and services, and in-situ slum upgrading. During this time, the Bank financed 50 urban sector loans in 35 countries, with sites and services and in-situ upgrading absorbing almost 60 percent of its allocations. By the mid-1980s, this particular project approach to housing and urban development had met with serious criticism from both within and outside of the Bank. At the micro-level, criticism was leveled at the inefficiencies created by individual projects. Such critiques included: slow rates of implementation and are cord of poor administration; inadequate levels of community participation; inappropriately high building standards and regulations making projects very expensive and hard to replicate; overly complex integrated projects which took a multi-sectoral approach to infrastructure while also seeking to address land tenure; a poor record on cost recovery and operations and maintenance; the problems in upgrading individual neighborhoods that did not connect to citywide networks. At the macro-level, critiques centered on the lack of an overarching institutional framework and the concomitant need for programmatic approach to urban lending. Such macro critiques led to a wave of policy prescriptions in the late 1980s and the 1990s which focused instead on establishing efficient property markets, setting appropriate regulations and standards, decentralizing authority to local governments, and building local capacity.