A COMPARATIVE APPRAISAL OF TRANSPORT AND POVERTY PATTERNS FOR AFRICAN CITIES

The last fifty years upsurge of urban motorization has been accompanied by social inequalities, traffic congestion, inefficacious public transport, and detrimental impacts on community health due to environmental pollutions. In all this change, the urban poor often have been most adversely affected. Poverty mitigation is an imperative facet of urban sustainable development. The objective of the study reported herein was to shed some light on transport and poverty patterns for some selected African urban areas, during the last decade. In order to facilitate the urban poverty eradication, the study is an attempt to provide clues and empirical evidences of the possible interrelationships between urban transport and urban poverty. Using centralized databases of international agencies, for the period of 1993 to 1998, for a set of African cities, urban information pertinent to transport and poverty was collected. The study database consisted of information regarding population, poverty, travel behaviour and other pertinent social, environmental and economic attributes of the selected urban areas. The database univariate statistical analysis provided clues on data validation and completeness. Due to data inaccessibility, incompleteness and missing, around half of the original set of cities wer