What African metropolitan areas teach the world about inclusive transitions
Author: Júlia Palmarola, Metropolis
Across the African continent, metropolitan areas are facing profound pressures: accelerating climate risks, uneven digitalisation, demographic growth, limited fiscal autonomy and fragmented institutional landscapes. Yet, despite these constraints, many of these territories are becoming powerful laboratories of innovation. They are designing new ways of working together, reframing participation, and experimenting with practical tools that help people navigate digital and climate transitions. These dynamics stood at the heart of the Solutions Lab “The Future of African Metropolises—Inclusive, Smart, and Sustainable”, a policy exchange organised by Metropolis in the framework of the research phase of the MICAD EU-funded project.
The exchange consisted of four online sessions, each designed to facilitate peer learning among diverse territories —from North Africa to West, Central and East Africa. These sessions combined case-sharing, collaborative exercises and guided reflection to identify what works, what doesn’t and what is needed to move forward. The insights that emerged are not only relevant for Africa. They offer guidance for metropolitan areas around the world, including those in Europe, and they are now feeding directly into the development of the MICAD Toolkit, the project’s main output.
A striking pattern across nearly all participating metropolitan areas was their ability to manage metropolitan-scale problems despite lacking formal metropolitan authorities. Issues such as land use, commuting, public transport, waste management or climate resilience routinely spill across municipal borders. Yet governance frameworks often do not.
African metropolitan areas described navigating:
Despite these barriers, metropolitan areas are moving forward. They rely on pragmatic coalitions, informal coordination, and strong political leadership to address problems that require collective action. This resourceful, adaptive form of governance holds important lessons for regions with more rigid or centralised institutional systems.
The Solutions Lab highlighted a second major insight: innovation in African metropolitan areas is rarely driven by technology alone. Instead, it emerges from processes that bring actors together —local governments, communities, civil society, academia and sometimes the private sector— to test new ideas in real-life conditions.
Several examples illustrated this clearly:
These cases show that metropolitan innovation is, above all, a social and institutional process. Digital tools help —but only when they reinforce inclusive, transparent and collaborative ways of working.
Perhaps the most powerful lesson from the four sessions is that inclusion is not an add-on. It is a prerequisite for successful climate and digital transitions. Metropolitan areas consistently pointed to barriers that keep certain groups excluded from decision-making:
Yet the Solutions Lab also showcased strategies that bring inclusion to the centre:
What emerges is clear: a transition can only be successful if the people most affected by it are part of the process from the outset.
The Solutions Lab is not an isolated activity. It is a core element of MICAD’s knowledge-gathering strategy. Before designing a Toolkit that should be internationally relevant, MICAD must understand how transitions are experienced in very diverse institutional, cultural and economic contexts. African metropolitan areas are not “beneficiaries” of European research —they are knowledge partners whose experiences are essential for creating tools that any metropolitan area, anywhere, can use.
Be part of a transformative movement towards inclusive climate and digital solutions. Together, we can shape sustainable metropolitan futures.
