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Well-managed urbanization can accelerate Cote d’Ivoire’s ascent to middle-income status. Urbanization is not just about development of a single city within a country. In fact, a country’s cities can be treated as a portfolio of assets, each differentiated by characteristics that include size, location, and density of settlement. Cote d’Ivoire’s small cities and market towns could be anchors generating scale economies for agribusiness. Whereas southwest regions strongly contribute to the production and export of cash crops, savanna areas can help scale up food and cereal production to supply urban centers domestically and regionally. In the long term, with the movement of the cocoa belt from eastern and central regions to the south (with an eye on the port of San-Pedro), climate change and international economic conditions might once more shift the heart of these cash-crop production areas. Given increasing regional disparities in Cote d’Ivoire, good connections between the agricultural hinterlands of secondary cities and strategic regional capital cities may help smallholders to modernize into agribusiness chains. This framework reflects the principles identified by stakeholders from national and subnational governments and the private sector, which helped to formulate a shared vision of urbanization in Cote d’Ivoire. These stakeholders believe that successful urbanization should lead to cities that are planned, structured, competitive, attractive, inclusive, and organized around development poles. The analysis and recommendations presented in this report benefited greatly from stakeholders’ inputs, through a validation workshop held in Abidjan in July 2015. |
