The City of Accra has been named among the 10 most innovative cities in Africa by the Knight Frank’s Africa Horizons Report for 2021/22.
The cities are Nairobi, Cape Town, Kampala, Cairo, Johannesburg, Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Dakar, Accra and Addis Ababa.
According to the report, African countries will emerge resilient from the Covid-19 pandemic if only they are innovative and provide long term social solutions to their residents, attracting funding and generating new demand for space.
The research looked through over 100 data points applied to 29 capital cities from a long list of over 500 cities in Africa to arrive at a unique innovation score.
The innovation score comprises four components quality of innovation factors innovation infrastructure, such as the number of different research organisations in a city funding drive to innovate, which looks at data around motivation to innovate.
The capital city of Kenya, Nairobi, has been ranked the most innovative city n the Continent by the report.
Knight Frank Researcher for Africa, Tilda Mwai, said “Innovation coupled with economic growth will drive the next decade of investment in Africa. Lower risk investors will likely favour cities with above-average innovation scores and a robust economy. These include Cairo, Egypt – the stand-out performer – and Johannesburg, South Africa.
These cities have the greatest potential to remain economically resilient in the long term despite undergoing short-term shocks.
“Cities that score higher for Innovation but have less robust economies will attract those willing to take more risk, such as private equity investors.
These cities include Nairobi, Kenya, Cape Town in South Africa and Kampala, Uganda.”
The report added that data centres are especially expected to grow to help with Innovation in the cities.
The report notes that Africa’s Data Centre markets can be categorised into three tiers. Tier one markets include Johannesburg, Cape Town and Nairobi and already becoming Africa’s leading data centres markets.
Tier two markets are cities in the most populous countries such as Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam and Kampala with strategic positioning. Finally, tier three markets are low population centres with relatively low ease of doing business.
