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The average family in Ibadan, one of Nigeria’s largest cities, spends nearly half its income not on food, rent, or school fees — but on surviving a broken infrastructure system.
Buying water from street vendors costs them ten times more than if their home was serviced with piped water. Running a generator to make up for frequent power outages eats further into their budget. Paying unregulated minibus fares to get around drives up their costs even more.
Across the continent, this is not unusual. According to the World Bank Group’s Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the Worldreport, African urban households pay 20 to 31% more for goods and services than city dwellers in other developing countries due to their cities’ lack of dense spatial form and infrastructure connections. Missing infrastructure is a regressive tax, driving up poor households’ costs and affecting businesses’ productivity and growth.
Therein lies the opportunity: building that missing infrastructure, cleanly, is one of the most powerful ways to make urban life more affordable in developing economies. This would help make cities greener and to reduce their emissions — while also creating more and better jobs for Africa’s growing urban population.
Modeling the Path to Green, Affordable Cities
This is where the World Bank Group’s APEX platform can help. Developed by a team at the International Finance Corporation, APEX — Advanced Practices for Environmental Excellence in Cities — is a data-driven tool that supports city planners to model their environmental footprint, simulate the impact of green investments, and estimate costs and emissions reductions.
Using APEX insights, cities can develop “Green City Action Plans” to map out and sequence investments across energy, water, transport, and waste. In Nigerian cities, for example, APEX analysis shows that building clean infrastructure could help households to increase their savings from 0% to 25% of their monthly budgets. Replacing their expensive fuel generators with solar photovoltaic systems would bring their household energy costs down from $24/month to $5/month, while paying for regulated public transport buses instead of unregulated minibus fares would reduce their transportation expenses from $41/month to $18/month.
The private sector is already moving. In Nigeria, companies like Sun King and d.light are selling solar systems directly to households, using pay-as-you-go mobile money models. And the market is responding: last year, pay-as-you-go solar sales overtook cash sales for the first time across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Formalizing, not Replacing Informal Jobs
Across the cities where infrastructure gaps are largest, services are already being delivered, just informally. Informal water venders, waste collectors, and minibus operators are a workforce foundation to build on. Formalizing and financing this economy, rather than replacing it, is both faster and smarter.
For example, franchising models can bring informal transport operators under regulated routes and connect them to finance to electrify their vehicles, creating stable, formal jobs in the process. Aggregating borehole operators into performance-based cooperatives can create the basis for a functioning water utility without starting from scratch. In Dakar, a 25-year “affermage” model — a form of lease agreement where a private operator runs a public service — expanded piped water access to 98% of the urban population by working with existing operators, not around them.
The World Bank Group’s blended finance instruments, IFC’s private sector advisory services, and MIGA’s guarantees are purpose-built to de-risk exactly these models. Our One-World Bank Group approach, combining public lending, private investment, and risk mitigation in a single package, gives cities the integrated support they need to move from informal substitute economies to green service economies, at scale.
Green Investments Make Life More Affordable
Clean distributed solar costs less than diesel. A franchised bus network costs households less than unregulated minibuses. Piped water costs less than vendor payments. Every one of these interventions also generates local employment — solar technicians, recycling operatives, fleet managers, water cooperative administrators.
That’s smart development in action. These investments make life more affordable while creating the exact kinds of jobs the World Bank Group’s jobs strategy prioritizes: rooted in foundational infrastructure, accessible to young people without advanced qualifications, and embedded in the local economy.
City leaders in the developing world are looking for solutions that cut what their residents pay and expand what their residents earn. Green infrastructure delivers both.
READ MORE: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/sustainablecities/cities-can-create-jobs-go-green-and-become-more-affordable-at-th
