Angola Secondary Cities Support Program

The objective of the Secondary Cities Support Program is to strengthen institutional capacity for climate-informed urban growth management and urban infrastructure delivery and increase access to affordable housing solutions in select urban areas in Angola. The Program contributes to the World Bank Group’s mission to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet, the Evolution priorities, regional areas of focus, and the strategic directions of the Climate Change Action Plan 2021-2025. It supports a more livable planet by fostering the development of more low carbon and climate-resilient cities and homes and extending access to life essentials such as clean water and electricity. It contributes to relieving poverty and boosting shared prosperity by fostering more compact and connected cities that enhance economic opportunities through agglomeration benefits and access to jobs, expanding access to decent affordable housing for lower-income urban residents, improving fiscal sustainability through the more strategic use of government resources in the urban and housing sectors, and mobilizing private investment in housing. The Program is aligned with the World Bank Group’s 2018 Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) for the Republic of Angola and the forthcoming Country Partnership Framework (CPF) for 2025-2030. The Program addresses the second, third and fourth binding constraints to poverty reduction and shared prosperity identified in the latest SCD: (i) a weak private sector unable to sustain growth momentum; (ii) exclusion of the poor from growth benefits and lack of human capital; and (iii) weak governance. The Program will address these by improving the enabling environment for private sector housing investments, increasing the government’s delivery of basic services and housing solutions for low income and vulnerable households, and strengthening capacity for urban governance. It will also strengthen local government capacity to deliver upon decentralized competencies in planning and service delivery. The project will incentivize climate-informed public investments in urban infrastructure, include NBS for heat and flood management.