As you enter Musanze by road, especially for those who’ve not been on that route for a while, one is abruptly taken by how more elaborate the town now looks with the revamped main street and the shiny new buildings that have come up in recent years.

What has not changed is its key landing for tourists, offering a suitably urbane welcome before they wend their way through Kinigi to trek the tranquil mountain gorilla families on the slopes of the scenic Virunga Volcanoes.

But perhaps what one does not tend to hear much of, is how the town’s prosperity has inevitably attracted migrants, including quite a few from across the East African Community that I know, underscoring the pull of its economic growth.

These migrants have contributed to the larger Musanze District’s population, estimated at 398,000 in 2017, from which a significant proportion inhabits the urban environs of the town itself.

That said, therefore, the town is, properly speaking, an intermediary city (i-city). I-cities are defined as having a population between 50,000 and one million people.

I only mention Musanze as a nostalgic throwback to an extended period of time I spent there researching more than a decade ago. But other than attracting migrants, another attribute of i-cities like Musanze, is the role they play connecting important rural and urban areas to basic facilities and services.

During the Africities Summit, last month at the lakeside city of Kisumu in Kenya, we learnt that Africa has around 1,500 intermediary cities with populations of between 50,000 and 500,000 inhabitants, and that they account for just over 30% of the entire urban population in the continent.

It might come as a surprise that this was the first time that the summit, held every three years since 1998, focused on i-cities given the role they play in urbanisation.

Aside from providing facilities and offering services, they link populations living in rural areas and small towns to the larger networks of major cities and their metropolitan areas.

They are also key incubators of urban growth. It is projected that the majority of new urban dwellers will move to cities with populations of less than 500,000. They will be home to nearly two out of every three new urbanites. 

And this may be sooner than one might expect, with the cities projected to double their population and surface area in the next 10 to 15 years.

Many of the intermediary cities in Africa are therefore already experiencing significant development pressures from urbanisation. 

While it might be expected that the cities cannot all grow at the same pace, there are different distribution patterns of i-cities’ populations between the different regions of the continent.

Northern Africa, for instance, is the most urbanised region of Africa, with 56% of its people living in urban centres. Of this urban population, a significant 42% live in i-cities.

East Africa lies at the other end of the spectrum, being the most rural of the continent’s regions with only 26% of its population living in cities. 

Most urban dwellers in East Africa live in intermediary cities (35%) and small towns of less than 50,000 inhabitants (36%). Only 28% of the urban population live in metropolitan areas of large cities.

It however doesn’t matter the size of the population in the intermediary cities, many of the continent’s i-cities are neglected in development policy despite the pressures of their growing urbanisation and its broader impact. 

The just-concluded Kisumu summit could thus have not been held at a more opportune time and better themed, more so in the face of the negative economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the unfolding climate crisis because of global warming.

The theme for the summit was: The Role of Intermediary Cities of Africa in the Implementation of Agenda 2030 of the United Nations and the African Union Agenda 2063.

UN Agenda 2020 relates to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to end poverty, protect the planet, and bring peace and prosperity to all. Urban areas fall under goal 11 of the SDGs and it is affirmed under the UN New Urban Agenda to make cities more inclusive, safer, more resilient and more sustainable.

The African Union Agenda 2063 on the other hand is a strategic framework for the socio-economic transformation, growth and sustainable development of the continent by the year 2063. 

These agendas provide a much-delayed path to better entrench i-cities at the local, national and global levels.