Why Leonard Wantchekon is hopeful for Africa's urban future.
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When young people in Kenya flooded the streets of Nairobi in protest against proposed tax hikes, and when post-election protests in Tanzania were met with an unusually heavy hand, the global story that filtered out tended to settle on a familiar frame: angry young people, restless cities, and fragile states.
Leonard Wantchekon, James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton and founder of the African School of Economics, wants to push back against that frame. He joined Kurtis Lockhart and I on Ideas in Development to discuss why cities are best understood not as a youth problem but as a youth opportunity. For Leonard, the problems we do see in cities are usually a story about governance, not about the young people themselves.
Cities as engines of culture, science and liberalism
Growing up in rural Benin, Leonard’s move to the city for secondary school was transformative, not because of school alone, but because of what came with city life. The French Cultural Centre, with its newspapers and films. Classmates from across Benin and visiting students from Nigeria.
Even before his move to the city, a nearby plant biology lab where scientists from Thailand and France ran conferences, the type of innovation hub that is more common in cities, broadened Leonard’s horizons.
“Walking around that place just made me wanted to think super big”.
For Leonard, cities are where cultural institutions can flourish, where science and technology can more easily be clustered into hubs that absorb young people regardless of background, and where peaceful politics is more likely to take root than in the countryside.
“Almost by definition, protests in cities are far more likely to be peaceful than protests in rural areas... You don’t have many places to hide. So as a result, you have to use your words.”
Reframing Kenya and Tanzania
Leonard views the Kenyan finance bill protests as sitting in the long shadow of a country whose politics has not fully reckoned with a colonial-era inheritance of violence. The remedy is not to pathologise youth mobilisation but to invest in the institutions that channel it, including independent media, NGOs that promote peaceful protest, and above all habits of dialogue between government and the young.
“What happened is not because of the youth,” he insists. “What happened is because of the government.”
Tanzania’s post-election repression worries him for a different reason. On top of the casualties, the longer-run cost is to a political culture that has historically been remarkably peaceful. He returns to Julius Nyerere’s warning, decades ago, that what governments do to the youth today, the youth may one day do back. To repress is to teach the next generation that violence is a legitimate tool of power. He recalls a story a colleague once told him about Ghana in the 1960s: a moment of acute political crisis, and a father’s response to his son’s question about what to do. “He said, let’s set up a newspaper.”
Leonard identifies that instinct, to reach for words rather than weapons, as the political culture worth protecting.
Beyond the ‘jobs or unrest’ trap
The standard policy frame on urban youth is that they need jobs or things will fall apart. Leonard thinks this is too narrow. Plenty of young people in African cities are working; the question is whether their work is stable, dignified and connected to a sense of upward movement. Hunger, he points out, does not automatically produce crime. Instead, what produces social fragility is the absence of institutions that build social connection, the lack of credible hope, and a shortage of political education that teaches young people why peaceful organisation works.
Leonard also feels that too much of what passes for entrepreneurship policy in African cities is “all about survival”, involving the handing out small sums to street-corner businesses. The continent’s biotech labs, AI labs and university research centres are, for the most part, not being plugged into urban entrepreneurship in any serious way. The opportunity, in his view, is to push innovation-driven entrepreneurship as a real engine of urban prosperity rather than treating science and the high street as separate worlds.
Why cities are the antidote to clientelism
Wantchekon’s research, including in Benin, finds that clientelist politics is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon. In cities, voters can see beyond their own group, so opposition parties, which tend to run on programmes rather than patronage, typically do better. Even in deeply conservative regions, places that look more like cities behave more like cities politically. He reaches for a striking example from Wyoming, where small towns near Yellowstone vote noticeably bluer than the surrounding countryside, simply because tourism and migration have made them more cosmopolitan.
Leonard argues that anyone who wants to break the grip of clientelist, divisive or far-right politics should look to urban politics as their best ally. Cities are harder to divide and harder to mobilise around fear-based rhetoric, because the people in them are exposed to too much variety to fall easily for any single story.
What civic engagement should actually look like
Asked what genuinely effective civic engagement looks like, Wantchekon points to deliberative democracy. His own experimental work has tested what happens when corrupt local governments and clientelist elections are nudged towards deliberation: town hall meetings rather than rallies, structured local consultations rather than money-driven mobilisation. The results, he says, are consistent: candidates who deliberate win more votes for less spending, and local governments that deliberate become less corrupt and perform better.
“We have solutions for those issues... And those are, they can be simple. We need to introduce them. We need to expand them. We need to strengthen them.”
The institutional minimum for cities, in his view, is built around two ideas: deliberation, which generates transparency, and decentralisation, which generates agency. Here, decentralisation is not just a budgetary slogan, it is the practical claim that neighbourhood-level organisations should be empowered to take ownership of cleaning, schooling, safety and social cohesion. He worries especially about the rise of gated enclaves where the wealthy retreat from the wider community behind their own private security.
A third strand, which is often underdiscussed in economics, is culture. Music festivals, public art, places where rich and poor can mingle around something they both enjoy. These, Leonard argues, are among the lowest-hanging fruit for building real urban social cohesion in Africa, where the cultural potential is abundant and undermobilised.
“Africa in particular is a place where you have so much talent, so many people value art… music festivals in Africa, for instance, should be every month… I mean, maybe that’s too much, but every three months, because it’s such an easy, low-hanging fruit to get people to join”
The African School of Economics, and rethinking universities
“First of all, originally, it was about bringing Black faces in the profession, in economics, because the numbers are super bad.”
Leonard traces founding the African School of Economics back to a stark statistic: only around 3% of papers in top economics journals have an African co-author. Without African voices in the discipline, the kinds of arguments he is making, drawn from lived experience and detailed local knowledge, simply do not make it into the literature.
ASE began in Benin and is now expanding to Zanzibar, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, with a research hub at Princeton designed to put rigorous, multidisciplinary work behind specific institutional reforms in African cities.
The broader argument he wants to make to African universities is that the standard model, teaching factories disconnected from local life, is a dead end. African scholars should be partnering with farmers, firms and governments to commercialise their research and solve real problems. Promotion criteria should reward the solving of problems, not just the counting of papers.
“You shouldn’t get promoted simply based on how many papers you publish. You should be promoted (by the) real innovation you have made, what real problem you have set.”
Where the smart money should go
Leonard wants to see funding bet on institutions like ASE: research-driven, entrepreneurial universities whose ripple effects spread through both the business ecosystem and government. He also wants to see a focus on the institutional plumbing of urban social cohesion, things like the physical and virtual spaces where people meet and trust is built.
For a continent on the verge of one of the largest urban transitions in human history, that is an argument worth taking seriously, we need to think more about culture and politics, and not focus solely on the economic benefits of cities.