According to data from the most recent inter-census period, some sub-Saharan African countries are now urbanizing very slowly. Actual decreases in the level of urbanization are rare, but have been recorded for Zambia (where counter-urbanization began in the 1980s) and Côte d'Ivoire and Mali (where there is evidence of counter-urbanization during the 1990s). Countries where urbanization levels are stagnating or increasing very slowly, especially when considering large and medium-sized towns, include Benin, Mozambique, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Niger. The East African situation is more mixed, but growth rates in many large centres are around or below the national rate. For many urban centres there is evidence of increased circular migration, which has reduced the contribution of in-migration to urban growth. These trends are largely the result of declining economic opportunities in many urban areas, reflecting crises in urban poverty and livelihood insecurity.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.In many African countries, economic decline in the 1980s, and the impact of IMF structural adjustment programmes, combined to devastate the real incomes of a very large proportion of the urban population. The impact has not necessarily only been felt amongst those who were already poor, although undoubtedly they have tended to suffer the most. Many public sector workers, previously often considered to be part of the socalled 'labour aristocracy', were reduced to incomes which only covered a fraction of the absolute necessities of existence, or, worse still, lost their jobs. Urban service provision has also declined, often dramatically. The gap between real rural incomes and real urban incomes has often narrowed considerably. It appears that the rate of urban growth in some African countries has slowed considerably, and there is also some evidence that new forms of 'reverse migration' from urban to rural areas have occurred. An attempt will be made to assess this evidence, drawing on examples from different countries, including Zambia, Uganda and Tanzania.
Conceptualisations of the informal sector in terms of economic dualism have a long history, as have effective challenges to those conceptualisations. These are discussed in this paper, which then examines shifts in attitudes towards the role of the urban informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa over recent decades, with reference to these theoretical conceptualisations and other approaches. The paper then discusses the dynamics of the sector and the changing role of the African state in promoting or discouraging it and identifies an increasingly negative trend in this respect. Finally, the paper offers a comparative perspective, from north of the Limpopo, on current debates and policy pronouncements about the 'second economy' in South Africa.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.