Cities are burning. Flooding. Overheating.And still—we keep building the same way.
By: Akinde Oluwaseun
I was in Addis last week. Africa Climate Week. The air thick with urgency. At the Cities Lab, we sat in a circle—mayors, activists, planners, funders. No suits. No scripts. Just real talk.
One thing hit hard: cities know what to do. They’ve always known.
But no money. No power. No seat at the table.
Take Durban. They built early warning systems—with the people, not for them. Locals run it. Trust is high. Lives saved.
Dakar? BRT buses now. Less traffic. Cleaner air.
Brazil’s “Adapt-a-City” program? 600 towns getting support. Not top-down. Bottom-up.
Sounds good, right?
But here’s the catch: most of these projects are running on hope. And scraps.
Financing? Always the bottleneck.
You get a grant—great. But then it ends. And what’s next? No pipeline. No follow-up. Just silence.
And the funds that do come? Often go to big consultants. Firms with fancy reports. Zero local knowledge.
Meanwhile, the small groups—the ones actually doing the work—struggle to fill out the forms. Literally. The paperwork is a barrier.
We kept coming back to this: ambition is cheap.
Implementation—that’s where courage shows.
Especially in informal settlements. Where people live on slopes that could slide. Near rivers that will flood. No drainage. No warning. No plan.
And yet—they’re left out of the planning. Again.
So what’s the way forward?
First: stop treating cities like children.
National governments—stop hoarding the money. Share the power. Co-own the process.
Second: fix the funding. Not just more money. Smarter money.
Catalytic funds should go to those who understand the ground. Not just those who write the best proposals.
Third: bring in the small players. The SMEs. The women’s co-ops. The youth collectives.
They’re not “stakeholders.” They’re leaders. Time to fund them like that.
At our org—Society for Planet and Prosperity—we’re tired of lip service.
We’re pushing for subnational governments to be in the room when NDCs are written. Not after. Not consulted. In it.
Because NDCs? They’re political documents. National promises.
But climate change hits locally. So solutions must start there.
Imagine if the Green Climate Fund had a direct lane for city-SME-national gov partnerships.
No middlemen. No delays. Just trust. And resources.
That’s how you scale.
That’s how you make it stick.
We left the lab with one clear thought:
If we don’t empower cities now—really empower them—then all this talk means nothing.
Action isn’t coming from the top.
It’s coming from the streets.
From the markets.
From the neighborhoods.
Let’s stop blocking it.
And start backing it.
