I want to make something very clear: there are very few networks, projects, or collaborative agendas I know of as a city leader coming from the African Union. It’s extremely rare that the African Union takes the lead in bringing together the urban agenda.
Africa is the fastest urbanising continent, yet apart from one initiative—the first African Urban Forum in 2024—I haven’t seen any meaningful action from the AU. There’s a leadership vacuum that should be filled by the AU and regional organisations. I expected there to be a small secretariat or unit at the SADC level spearheading urbanisation initiatives, but I’ve not heard of one.
At the regional level, there’s a lack of boldness and initiatives that would really lead the work for African urbanisation.
My city, Quelimane, is easily one of the most climate- vulnerable cities, not only in Mozambique, but in the world. It’s a coastal city built on a swamp on the banks of a river. We face two kinds of flooding—coastal saltwater intrusion, and flooding from sea level rise and abnormal rain. Most of the time these happen simultaneously, making the situation very dire.
We experience flooding every single year. So, my first priority is to make sure we have infrastructure to manage flooding. When it rains too much, we flood. When it doesn’t rain during the dry season, we have food supply problems due to water scarcity.
The second is building up human capacity. You need people who understand the causes of these extreme weather events and consequences, but also an international community of institutions to help navigate this complexity. For a country like mine, where most people only speak Portuguese, language can be a barrier to accessing funding and information. Even with a well-qualified team, you still face the challenge of accessing financial resources. Those are my three main priorities: infrastructure, equal access to information, and financial resources.
We’re not the same political party as the national government, which creates problems sometimes. We need the national government to provide access to information and to the many funding opportunities, like the Green Fund, which could only be accessed through the relevant national government agency or ministry.
The general expectation is that mayors should play their role to achieve the SDGs, but the central government doesn’t seem to share that view. The government has embassies abroad, ministries that get information from the international system. They know what the priorities are, but there’s no clear communication line with local governments. It’s like we’re fighting in different fields with different purposes. How do they expect us to contribute?
In local governments, we work like firefighters. You wake up with an agenda, and by day’s end, out of 10 planned things, you may only fulfil one, because other issues are always coming up. If I’d known, I would have done firefighting training rather than studying economics—it would fit better for a mayor’s job.
