Rapid and large-scale urbanization, together with a drive towards environmental and financial sustainability, creates considerable challenges and opportunities for engineers and engineering education in Africa. The project “Engineering Education for Sustainable Cities in Africa (EESC-A)” is multi-faceted across multiple dimensions – urban issues, sustainability, climate change, Global South & Global North, and existing versus new forms of university level pedagogy. It addresses two deep global challenges: (1) enabling the creation of sustainable infrastructure for the future mega-cities in Africa, which will be the largest cities in the world by 2100, and (2) using advances in education, which we are researching and experimenting with on campus at UofT today, to help scale up the training for the required cadre of engineers – both African and Canadian – to build out African cities.

The number of African cities with over 5 million in population will grow from 10 in 2010 (about 10% of global share) to 67 in 2100 (representing 43% of such cities globally). By 2100 our forecasts show African cities will make up 5 of the top 10 cities in the world by population, and 13 of the top 20, with the largest having 88 million residents (Hoornweg & Pope, 2014).

Source: Hoornweg, D., and Pope, K., 2017. “Population predictions for the world’s largest cities in the 21st century.” Environment & Urbanization, 29(1): 195-216.