Nairobi is hosting this week the 2nd African Urban Forum (AUF2), meant to prepare the continent adopt a Common position on housing and human settlements at the 13th World Urban Forum to convene in Baku, Azerbaijan, May 17–22.
The forum, held under the theme “Adequate Housing for All: Advancing Socioeconomic and Environmental Transformation towards the Realization of Agenda 2063,” places housing at the heart of Africa’s urban future as a unifying lens for development, resilience, and inclusion.
The AUF is the continent’s premier platform for multistakeholder dialogue on urbanization and human settlements. It seeks to harness Africa’s rapid urban growth as a catalyst for socioeconomic transformation.
It gathers policymakers, city leaders, financiers, practitioners, and researchers for a series of dialogues around the system shifts needed to advance climate action, infrastructure finance, and land governance for better housing across the continent.
A forum side-event will feature a presentation of early findings from the State of African Cities Report 2026: Harnessing the Value of Urban Land for Socioeconomic Transformation in African Cities. The report, to be launched at the World Urban Forum in Baku, assesses the evolution of urban land valuation across Africa, and how Land-Value Capture is emerging as a mechanism for driving investment towards public priorities like infrastructure, housing, public spaces, and climate adaptation. Participants will have the opportunity to hear about case studies from cities like Freetown, Addis Ababa, Kigali, Lome, Stellenbosch, Dar es Salaam, and Kumasi.
Across Africa, cities face limited access to finance, with deficits in waste, energy, mobility, and basic services undermining housing delivery. Through case studies from cities in Ghana & Kenya, another side-event will showcase how the Climate-resilient Infrastructure Investments in Cities (CIVIC) platform, led by CoM-SSA, C40 Cities’s Finance Facility (CFF), and the City Climate Finance Gap Fund, are helping transform urban climate priorities into investment-ready infrastructure pipelines through integrated and coordinated technical support.
Morocco is represented at this 2nd African Urban Forum which runs from April 8 to 10 by a delegation led by the Secretary of State in charge of Housing, Adib Benbrahim.
