By Macharia Kamau
KENYA: Despite numerous challenges faced by Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city has made it to the top 10 list of cities from low and medium income countries likely to achieve global city status over the next 10 to 20 years.
Nairobi faces myriad challenges including congestion, a chaotic public transport system and insecurity. Others include poor waste management, unstable power supply and governance issues at City Hall.
But the Global Cities Index by American research firm AT Kearny named Addis Ababa and Nairobi as the two cities from sub-Saharan Africa that are likely to achieve a developed city status over the next 10 to 20 years.
This is on the back of the infrastructure projects that the respective governments are undertaking and the number of global businesses they have attracted or expect to attract in the coming years. Other factors taken into consideration in the ranking include human capital and innovation taking place in the cities.
Addis Ababa has been positioned in third place while Nairobi was ninth on the index released last week. The two Eastern Africa cities were named alongside major cities from Asia and South America. They included Jakarta in Indonesia, Manila of Philippines, Sao Paulo of Brazil and India’s New Dehli.
“Addis Ababa is the third most likely city to advance its global positioning… it improved performance on the leading innovation indicators by a large margin between 2008 and 2013,” said the AT Kearny report.
“At current rates of improvement, Addis Ababa is also among the cities closing in fastest on the world leaders in income equality, healthcare and business transparency,” it said. “The next sub-Saharan city on Emerging Cities Outlook is Nairobi, in ninth place, where IBM is already building a research laboratory.”
While Nairobi has attracted some major global companies, some of them setting up regional headquarters in the city, it is still cited as not conducive to business. Rwanda’s Kigali has also attracted huge Foreign Direct Investments.
AT Kearny’s Emerging Cities Outlook measures the likelihood that a city will improve its global standing over the next 10 to 20 years by focusing on the leading indicators such as business activity, human capital and innovation.
