Learning from Africa's urban climate innovations: A new framework and comparative analysis to foster transformative climate action

Source abstract

African cities face intensifying climate risks shaped by rapid urbanisation, informality, unequal access to services, and exclusionary governance, yet they are also important sites of experimentation and innovation. This paper examines how climate innovations in African cities have emerged across technological, social, governance, and livelihood domains, and it assesses their potential to support equitable and transformative urban climate action. We seek to fill several gaps in existing innovation scholarship, which is often biased towards isolated sectors and Global North contexts, by offering a cross-sectoral and justice-oriented analysis of African urban examples. The paper will develop an analytical framework that considers three dimensions of climate innovation: domains of action, types of innovation, and levels of equity and scale. This framework is applied to case studies from East and Southern Africa (Kampala, Durban, Nairobi, Embu, and Dar es Salaam), including pay-as-you-go solar energy, community-based flood early warning systems, co-produced climate information, nature-based solutions, and psychosocial resilience initiatives.Rather than consisting of technological change alone, climate innovations in African cities often involve hybrid combinations of social, technical, governance, and livelihood innovations that respond simultaneously to climate risks and wider development challenges. Equitable innovations will require cross-cutting strategies including social mobilisation and enabling governance frameworks, appropriate technologies and inclusive livelihood support. Moreover, we argue that their transformative potential depends largely on whether innovations become institutionally embedded, linked across scales, and oriented towards justice. Our findings and framework may offer lessons for promoting inclusive, scalable pathways towards climate resilience in cities of the Global South.