The second Africa Urban Forum took place from 8-10 April 2026 in Nairobi, organised by the African Union Commission. This was an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the scale and impact of rapid urbanisation on the African continent, and to explore practical pathways to enable more sustainable and inclusive urban growth. 

Many local government leaders were present in Nairobi and ICLEI and UCLG, together with UN-Habitat and other partners convened the first Local and Regional Governments Forum. The rich discussion resulted in four key recommendations, which resonate closely with the outcomes of the work that CLGF and its Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Initiative (CSCI) partners have been doing in the Commonwealth: 

• We need to view housing as an enabler of many more urban systems. 
  We need to connect the conversations of housing and urban development with cross-cutting themes like climate, biodiversity, energy, water and sanitation, food systems, mobility, public space and the broader question of city-making. There needs to be a shift from delivering and measuring housing as dwelling units to understanding human settlements as key to broader city-building and to ensuring people have access to amenities that improve their access and agency. We need to approach human settlements in a way that improves the quality of life and access to opportunities for meaningful livelihoods for Africans.  

• Local governments are at the intersection of global and national priorities, with communities and partners in their jurisdictions. If empowered and engaged as core partners, local governments act as systems leaders who bring together a whole set of urban actors to deliver housing at scale.  
  We need to actively think about private sector and community partnership in a meaningful way, where we empower local communities to plan their own settlements and acknowledge that the public sector alone cannot provide enough housing to meet the growing demand. We need to invest in the micro builders, the small and medium enterprises that are actually building our cities. 

• We need to fundamentally reframe our relationship with informality.
  We need to understand that informal systems and informal economies should receive investment instead of being relegated or removed.  

• We need to ensure that the resources needed to transform our cities arrive at the local level where they will be put to most effective use. 
  This means improving the consistency and predictability of inter-governmental transfers while also developing more innovative own-source revenue mechanisms. Yet mobilising finance is not only a question of increasing flows—it is about restructuring how finance reaches and works at the local level.   

A full write-up of the Local and Regional Government Forum is available on the ICLEI website here.  

The final Declaration of the Africa Urban Forum agreed by member states was framed around political commitment and policy reform on housing; land and infrastructure; fiscal reforms; national urban policies and territorial plans; urban climate action; and inclusive communities. It includes references to the importance of local government and action at the local level.  

2026 is an important year for the urban agenda, with UN-Habitat’s 10-year review of the New Urban Agenda underway and SDG11 one of the goals for review at the High Level Political Forum.