 Good morning everybody and I'm delighted to be here with you today it's a packed room on a Friday morning so that's great. Thank you very much Susanna and yes we are Susanna and I are old friends and we're just exchanging she's coming from Khatum and I was coming from Seoul and I was just looking at the data in the book on urban futures and I remember one of the pieces of work that we want to do is to understand what African cities look like and will look like in the next few years and Ricky the last time we met we were looking at sort of how cities and agglomerations are put together and Seoul was one of those places where people live and work in the same place so there is no distance traveled and but it took me two hours to get from my hotel in Seoul to the airport it also took me two hours to get from London city to the airport so there is still some work that needs to be done in all those places it takes me 15 minutes to get from my house to the airport in Addis so maybe Addis is doing something good so thank you very much everybody for coming to Addis and to discuss and have this conversation and sort of how we plan urban futures and I want to first of all really thank Ricky in the London School of Economics the UK actually we were in Seoul talking about inequality and with Professor Boginio and Professor Stiglitz and the issues around inequality and urban cities so it's a really it's all coming together and I think really that as we talk about inclusive growth the SDGs leaving no one behind we cannot do that without talking about Africa's emerging cities and Africa's youth because that is where Africa's youth are today they are all sort of agglomerating in our cities and I also want to thank the Alfred Herrhausen-Geschafert Foundation for working with us on this we have been talking about our cities and what we need to do to develop urban futures for a long time but I think that with the work that LSE is doing there is nothing as good as being able to measure look at the numbers and understand what you need to change and how you need to do it better when we talk about our cities on the continent we almost need to start talking about them as economic entities we talk about growth and we talk about the Ethiopia growing at 8% and being one of the fastest growing countries on the continent we talk about South Africa not growing as fast as we would like it to grow but when you talk about Durban or you talk about Johannesburg they're actually growing much faster and so I think we do need as a continent now to start unpacking where is the growth when we talk about 8% growth in Ethiopia we talking about all of Ethiopia we only talking about Addis and Derridawer maybe I think really as part of the new economic policies that we're putting in place as a continent we can do better and we can do differently we can look at you know different elements and different entities of the growth story and ensure that as we talk about that growth story and discuss the growth story we are making sure no one is left behind and that is why this particular conversation today is important for us for two reasons we believe that developing urban futures on the continent needs to go through three things the first one is how we crowd in and Susanna talked about it extensively financing to build the kinds of cities we want and we need and this brings me back to soul in 2008 when we had the financial crisis one of the I think transformational policies that they took was to decide that their stimulus package will be a green stimulus package and so they decided they would regreen all of soul tear down all the roads build greenways and essentially what that did was it took their growth rates from about 2% to 6% is back now at 2.8% which is why we're talking about inclusive growth in Korea but it enabled them to do two things was to rediscover and redesign the city of soul in a way that was greener in a way that was more adaptable to current urban livelihoods but also in a way that made the distances between work and living and I think as Susanna was saying much closer and I think these are the kinds of things that we need to do today when we look at a continent that is growing only at 3.1% which is we are happy that Africa has sort of turned the curve on growth again we were coming from 2.8 2.9 we're now at 3.1 the IMF says we will go to 3.8 next year that is not enough we need to get to eight as a continent we need to get to 10 I think when we think that we have almost 30 million kids that are going to be looking for jobs in the next few years a lot of those jobs are going to be in the cities I think the idea of developing urban futures presents an opportunity for us to see how we can ensure that as we redesign our cities we redesign them in a way that creates jobs for our youth we're gonna hear this afternoon from former governor Fashallah who is now the minister of infrastructure of Nigeria and I'll be very keen to listen to him I hope I can how he totally transformed Lagos I think when you went to Lagos you knew that if you landed you needed to take five hours from Lagos to the hotel I don't know who is laughing I'm sure you've done that experience but but now it doesn't take that long it takes two hours and Lagos has changed and it could even change we believe that you could do even more in Lagos and you can do that also by creating jobs and I think that this is really the challenge that we have on the continent today is how we redefine our cities and do that in a way that creates jobs we know that between now and 2040 we estimate that Africa will need about to a trillion US dollars in investments for its cities to trillion US dollars everybody's asking where we're going to get that from but again part of the problem and part of the advantage that we have is that the cities are going to be populated by youth the ECA just launched a whole digital agenda which is basically looking at how we transform our ideas into knowledge and how we work on platforms and many of you who have heard me before have heard me say that Uber that is a 10-year business is today worth 180 billion dollars so at least that is what it's predicted to be when it goes for an IPO this is much larger than the value of GM I was just coming from Korea and we were talking about this GM Toyota and all the 50 year old car companies in the world so we believe that if you can design urban cities on the continent in a way where you can agglomerate those ideas and use them as platforms for new initiatives we could actually leapfrog into the kinds of resources that we need to continue growing the economy because you will have ideas and I think Kenya is already doing this when you go into Kenya and you look at the iCloud factory and the agglomeration of the digital technology space with the new ideas the new jobs that are being created because our cities are being defined differently you see the potential and I think that this is what we're here to do today is really to talk about how we design and ensure that we can finance the potential for African cities to really be the new engines of growth for the continent as they are already being we have learned a lot of lessons from Miss Asia I think I used to live in the Philippines and 15 20 years ago it's interesting because we always use the airports as the sort of example of you know how well designed the city is and how quickly it takes I don't know the urban designers in the room will correct me or tell me why this is the case but maybe that's because everybody uses airports and the Philippines also dramatically redesigned its cities and became I think now and again follow the little bit the the Korea example or the other way around is looking at how do you design cities in a climate sensitive way and looking at ensuring that you have this collective human spaces where you can work at the same time and this is the an important point that Susanna mentioned is the slumps that gather around the cities and how you make sure and this is where the inequality questions begin to become important Philippines at the time had one of the largest slums in the world I mean disastrous and I'm sure many of you have seen that and so we had to design a whole program around how you do slump upgrading slump cleaning and actually begin to build green cities around the slums today if you go to that area in the Philippines you will not recognize it it is totally changed but this was using again the community community resources and social impact financing to be able to transform this part of the city we could do that I think in many of our cities this will hold for both Addis Ababa it would hold for Lagos it would hold for Nairobi it will be true for Duala and other countries and so one of the things that we want to do with this partnership and I think this is important and we hope that you will all come with us on this journey with LSE is to see how we can now and when I spoke with Ricky I said you know so where are the African cities in your index and they were two or three of course the obvious suspects and I said no no no we can't do that if we need to start designing cities we need to go further we need to have at this 15 African cities on your index so we're joining together now to get at this 15 African cities on the index I hope that many of you in the room either affiliated with some of those cities or related to them some of them will not be obvious because today they are still small but if you look at our growth projections and if you look at the movements of people on the continent in the next 15 years those will become important cities as well so we believe we should start looking at them today so that we can start helping in that process of design and so a lot of the work that we will be doing in the next year and I hope and when we meet at the next conference is talking about the results from some of the cities that we will be working on this is a little bit our bread and butter we are here as ECA the Economic Commission for Africa to do some analytical work and understand and provide some contribution to policy makers as they design new cities and work into the future as we do that of course then we have to talk about the energy how you provide the right kinds of infrastructure for those cities and what is needed we know that Africa is still struggling with its energy access we know that we don't have and I don't know if Minister Fashal I would say that he did a good thing leaving from governor of Lagos to minister of infrastructure of Nigeria trying to give them energy but clearly he's he was able to begin to solve one problem in Nigeria and he's doing a great job already at moving into increasing energy supply and one of the things that I know that they're doing in Nigeria is looking at green and clean energy and I think that that is another important combination of how we need to look at redesigning our cities is how do we do both the combination of green energy and clean and efficient cities at the same time and what kinds of financing can we pull together and we hope that we can have some ideas of how we do that and how that will be done I know that cities like Senegal for example already have all their streets that are lit by solar energy maybe we need to do more on the continent and do that with our universities as well finally and I see Ricky looking at his time there is an important part of cities which is the financing and how we can finance city development and how you can allow for municipal bonds to work on the continent we still have a lot of our countries that have access to capital markets but our municipalities do not yet have as frequent access to capital markets as we would like and we know that the cities cannot develop and will never be able to provide the kinds of infrastructure that is needed if they do not have access to the capital market so I think it's an important part of this work South Africa of course Joe Burke Joannisburg do already issue municipal bonds but not many of our cities do that and I think a big part of the work that we need to do is looking at how we begin to look at as we design our fiscal policy systems and look at the cities as almost new entities and new economic entities what are the financing frameworks what is the decentralized framework that works to allow for the cities to be able to provide for their residents this brings us to the question of intergovernmental transfers of course in the next 10 years Addis Ababa will probably that it already is 70% of the resources come from Addis Ababa how do you design a transfer mechanism and a transfer system that ensures that people in the rest of Ethiopia benefit from the immense wealth and the immense resources that will be coming here and I think that the next part of this work on urban cities and urban futures and even the United States is struggling with it today is how does California redistribute California is the seven largest economy in the world and and and the question then when you think about sort of redistribution of resources from California into Montana and how one does that those I think issues that we are struggling with at a global level and we need to look at how we do them here Shanghai had you redistribute resources from Shanghai into inner China and and I think that as we begin to do that and look at those kinds of interconnections the benefit of Africa coming behind all of this other experiences that we can learn from them and we can do much better and much faster to ensure that we get global growth it was funny because in London now they have this new saying of people going back to the villages so while we have this huge momentum in Africa of people moving to the cities there is a whole sort of I don't know what you call it revitalization of the UK and everybody's going back into the rural areas and and and that is an interesting sort of dynamic that is happening at a time when we are coming into the cities but the question is how do we manage that in a way that balances I think I think what the UK is telling us is that maybe the citizen offer everything you need and that we need to do some balance development which brings us finally back to partnerships is how we can work with DFID and I was just talking with Susanna and LSE and ourselves to ensure that this work continues that next time when we meet I'm sure Ricky is saying no I was going to say in another African city we can actually take this discussion further ahead and see how we can provide our policymakers with the kinds of resources that is needed to make sure that we actually win on this agenda and not create I think the kinds of tensions that we see in Latin America when cities go wrong we have examples of Brazil as a city that goes wrong with a lot of youth in it and I don't think that Africa wants to have a future like that and the benefit of having this conversations at least that hopefully we don't get to those tensions as we move forward so once again thank you so very much it is a huge agenda as I think is demonstrated from just what I've said but also from all the notes and all the work that is being done thank everybody for coming to Ethiopia for this discussion I think we look forward to learning a lot and to see how we can take this discussion forward in the next few days and with Ricky maybe to come back to you with what we have done for Africa as we go forward on this conversation once again thank you for organizing this thank you for coming thank you Susanna