Associational Life in African Cities: Popular Responses to the Urban Crisis

This book is about the multitude of associations that has emerged in African cities in recent years. In many cases, they are a response to mounting poverty, failing infrastructure and services, and more generally, weak and abdicating urban governments. Some associations are new, in other cases existing organisations are taking on new tasks. Associations may be neighbourhood-based, others may be city-wide and based on professional groupings or a shared ideology or religion. Still others have an ethnic base.