Community for Impact
Which barriers should be removed first to transform urban mobility across West Africa, and how can public, private and financial stakeholders be brought together around these priorities?
Themes
Modes of transport
Powered by
Project leader(s)
Charlène Kouassi
Movin'On
Establish a shared vision
Define the scope and mobilize partners
Review existing work and conduct interviews
Map the pain points
Movin'On members
Contributing partners
A pain-point map, together with a typology covering their nature, level and criticality, across the Greater Dakar and Greater Abidjan areas.
A shortlist of 3 to 5 priority “Movin'On” barriers from the five pain-point categories, each supported by an ecosystem action plan covering its objective, stakeholders, prerequisites, deliverables and success indicators.
In West Africa, urban mobility is caught in a major tension: cities are growing rapidly, but transport systems are struggling to keep pace. Services still rely largely on informal modes — minibuses, shared taxis, motorcycle taxis and tricycles — which meet a significant share of mobility needs but often remain poorly structured, highly polluting, prone to accidents and difficult to integrate into a coherent overall vision.
The first barrier is therefore the absence of a fully coordinated system. Existing modes meet genuine needs for accessibility, flexibility and affordability, but they are still poorly aligned with mass-transit projects, digital infrastructure, fare systems, road safety, access to energy and urban policies.
The second barrier is the fragmented nature of existing initiatives. Many solutions already exist or are emerging — BRT, electric buses, trams, TER, digital platforms, intermodality, electrification and new financing models — but they are often addressed separately, without a clear prioritization of needs or a shared understanding of the conditions required to bring them to scale.
The working group's challenge is therefore to build a shared map of the pain points: energy, safety, governance, modal integration, financing, and connections between metropolitan areas and secondary cities. The aim is to distinguish what falls within the remit of public policy, what depends on private operators, what requires strategic investment and what calls for coalitions of stakeholders.
Establish a shared, prioritized understanding of the barriers to developing sustainable urban mobility in West Africa.
Identify the most critical barriers: access to energy, road safety, the physical, digital and fare integration of modes, governance, financing and coordination among stakeholders.
Distinguish obstacles according to their nature: those that call for public action, those that depend on private stakeholders, those that require strategic financing and those that call for hybrid coalitions.
Produce a reference tool for decision-makers, with a priority focus on Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal.
Create a practical basis for launching partnerships, turning scattered initiatives into action priorities and preparing projects that can be deployed at territorial scale.
Scoping: defining the scope (areas, types of cities and categories of obstacles) and mobilizing public and private partners.
Fieldwork: reviewing existing work and conducting field and expert interviews to map barriers across the Greater Dakar and Greater Abidjan areas.
Consolidating and producing the map of pain points in West Africa
Presenting the methodology and initial findings at the Movin'On Summit
