Europe Needs to Spend More on Defense. Africa Needs to Spend More on Cities.

In February 2022, Europe discovered the hard way that diverting money form defense toward social programs came with a cost. Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposed three decades of erosion of defense industrial capacity, the dispersal of skilled workforces, the consolidation of supply chains and atrophy in the continent's institutional military knowledge. European governments had told themselves for thirty years that they were basically fine, that the American umbrella was permanent, that the two percent NATO target was aspirational rather than obligatory and that security was a permanent condition of the modern world rather than requiring maintenance.

The bill for that assumption is now arriving. Germany is spending more on defense in a single year than it spent in the previous decade combined. Poland is building the largest army in Europe. Countries that decommissioned artillery in the 1990s are discovering that reconstituting that capacity costs more than maintaining it would have cost. The defense industrial base that atrophied over thirty years cannot be rebuilt in three. The skilled workers who left the sector did not keep their skills current. The supply chains that consolidated around peacetime economics are not configured for wartime production. Every year of underinvestment has compounded into a larger and more expensive problem, and Europe is now paying the compounded bill.

Africa is making the same folly on its cities. The continent is urbanizing faster than any region in human history, in real time, but the investment in infrastructure, planning capacity and governance to shape that growth is running years and decades behind the scale of the challenge. African governments have told themselves that urbanization can be managed incrementally, that infrastructure can follow the population and that informal settlements housing the majority of urban residents in many cities are a temporary condition that development will eventually resolve. In short: they are ignoring the magnitude of the challenge at hand.

But informal settlements and chaotic infrastructure are becoming cities, and those cities are growing larger, in some cases so large that there is no earthly precedent. And the longer the investment is deferred, the more expensive the correction will become.

Africa's Urbanization Numbers Are Staggering

The Africa Urban Forum 2, held in Nairobi in April 2026, was themed around moving from conversation to execution. The AU's figures, presented at the forum, outlined significant stakes. Eighty percent of Africa's GDP will be generated by cities by 2050. The continent will add roughly a billion urban residents between now and then. The number of African cities with populations above one million will grow from 60 today to 159 by mid-century. Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam are each projected to be among the ten largest cities on earth within a generation.

These projections represent a physical and institutional challenge of a scale that has only one historical parallel: the urbanization of Europe during the industrial revolution, which produced, depending on where and when you look, either the civic infrastructure that made modern prosperity possible or the slums and disease and social catastrophe that Dickens documented and Haussmann was commissioned to fix. The difference between those two outcomes was not the pace of urbanization, but the decision to invest in infrastructure to support it.

Africa is making that decision right now in every city where informal settlements are absorbing migrants faster than infrastructure can reach them, in every secondary city where a master plan exists only on paper and in every capital where spectacular government buildings belie inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure. The decisions made in the next 15 years will set the physical form of African cities for the rest of the century. Urban form, once set, is resistant to change, as are infrastructure shortfalls.

Europe's defense planners understand this dynamic viscerally right now. Capacity that is allowed to atrophy does not stay available for reconstitution years later. It disappears, and rebuilding it costs more than maintaining it would have. Africa's urban planners understand the equivalent dynamic in theory, but whether African governments and their international partners will act on it before the bill arrives is a major question.

The NATO Target Set a Measurable Standard

The NATO two percent of GDP defense spending target has been criticized by defense economists for focusing on inputs rather than outcomes, for measuring spending rather than capability and for allowing governments to meet the threshold by counting pension costs and civil defense expenditures that have limited relevance to military readiness.

But the target also established a shared, simple, measurable benchmark that made the gap between commitment and reality visible and politically costly. When Germany spent 1.3 percent of GDP on defense and the United States complained publicly about it, the two percent figure made that complaint legible. It gave journalists a number to report, opposition politicians a number to cite and allied governments a number to use in bilateral pressure.

Then, when the political environment shifted after 2022, the target provided a ready-made framework for the rapid scaling of commitments. Every European government knew exactly what it was committing to when it announced it would reach two percent and every observer knew exactly how to measure whether it had.

African urban investment has nothing equivalent. The AU's Agenda 2063 contains urban development commitments expressed in qualitative terms. The New Urban Agenda, adopted at Habitat III in 2016, established principles and frameworks without binding numerical targets. The Africa Urban Forum 2 communique spoke of urgency and the need for scaled investment without specifying what scaled investment looks like in budget terms.

Vague commitments allow governments to point to rhetorical alignment with the shared agenda while making budget decisions that reflect different priorities. They allow international partners to announce support for African urban development without specifying what that support consists of.

A binding, measurable, politically accountable urban investment target for African governments would be uncomfortable in the same way the NATO target was uncomfortable. It would make underinvestment visible. It would create reputational costs for governments that fell short. It would transform urban infrastructure investment into a political imperative.

What would the target cover? Physical infrastructure only, or also planning capacity and institutional development? How would investment by state-owned enterprises and development finance institutions be counted alongside central government budget allocations? What verification mechanism would be credible across fifty-four member states with very different statistical capacities? These questions are complex but they need answers anyway. The AU absolutely can design an urban investment target across its membership.

The alternative is what European defense looked like in 2021: a continent with a shared commitment to security that had no mechanism for making that commitment real.

The Cost of Delay Compounds

Europe's defense underinvestment was a choice made by wealthy governments that had the fiscal capacity to spend at the NATO target and chose not to: comfortable democracies prioritizing social spending over defense commitments, with the implicit subsidy of American security.

Many African governments face much steeper fiscal constraints that make urban infrastructure investment extremely difficult, not just inconvenient. Debt service absorbs between 30 and 60 percent of government revenue in several of the continent's most rapidly urbanizing countries. The fiscal space to increase urban infrastructure spending is not available in the way that it was available to Germany or France or Italy, who simply chose not to use it. The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s, which required African governments to cut public investment as a condition of debt relief, did lasting damage to the institutional capacity for state-led infrastructure development that has not been repaired.

This distinction matters because it means that the solution for Africa cannot be simply to spend more in the way that Europe's solution is simply to spend more. The financing architecture question matters.

This is where the China dynamic, which we have examined in detail elsewhere in the context of Egypt's New Administrative Capital and the broader pattern of Chinese infrastructure finance across the continent, becomes directly relevant. African governments have been filling the urban infrastructure financing gap with Chinese policy bank lending partly because the alternative financing on offer from Western development institutions is slower and more conditional. The strategic costs of that dependency are becoming clearer as the operational phase of Chinese-financed infrastructure matures and the terms of concession agreements receive more scrutiny.

Europe's analogous dependency was on American security provision, and the cost of that dependency is also becoming clear as American strategic priorities shift and the reliability of the security guarantee is questioned in ways that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. In both cases the shortcut that looked affordable in the short term is revealing itself as a strategic vulnerability whose full cost was not visible until the external conditions that made it work began to change.

The financing that African urban investment actually needs is something that neither Chinese policy banks nor Western development finance institutions are currently providing: long-term, local-currency, patient capital for urban infrastructure, structured to build domestic institutional capacity rather than to create dependency on external financing relationships. The African Development Bank has been moving in this direction. The Nairobi-based African Urban Institute, if adequately resourced, could develop the technical standards and project preparation capacity that would make African urban projects more financeable. But the political commitment to make these institutions adequate to the scale of the challenge has been slow.

What Getting the Form Right Means

There is a reason that Haussmann's Paris and Cerdà's Barcelona have endured while the settlements that absorbed Europe's industrial-era migrants have been incrementally demolished. The reason is not that Haussmann and Cerdà were geniuses. It is that the decisions made early in a city's development about street widths, block sizes, land use patterns and infrastructure provision create path dependencies that are extremely expensive to reverse.

A street laid out in an informal settlement at four meters wide cannot be widened to eight meters without demolishing the buildings on either side. A neighborhood built without underground utilities cannot be retrofitted with them without tearing up every street. A district that develops without parks cannot acquire them later without purchasing and clearing developed land. The physical form of a city, once set, is not easily changed, and the cost of changing compounds as the value of the development grows.

This is why the investment has to happen now, not because African governments have unlimited fiscal space or because the financing is easy, but because the alternative is unacceptable. Every year that the physical form of a rapidly growing African city is set by the absence of planning rather than by its presence is a year that makes the eventual correction more expensive and more disruptive.

The upside is that there is still time to act before the form is fully set. The danger is that the gradualism of the crisis makes it easy to treat each year's inaction as a small and manageable failure rather than as a compounding commitment to a much larger future cost.

The Africa Urban Forum 2 was right that the moment has shifted from conversation to execution. But it fell short by not requiring binding commitments.

The Parallel Holds

African governments are not failing to invest in urban infrastructure because they are ignorant of the urbanization challenge or indifferent to their cities. They are failing, where they are failing, because the political incentives run the same way: the cost of underinvestment is deferred and diffuse, while the cost of spending is immediate and politically difficult in the context of constrained budgets and competing priorities. The international community is providing rhetorical support and insufficient capital, in the same way that it provided rhetorical commitment to European security and insufficient pressure to make that commitment real for far too long.

The moment Europe just had, the painful, expensive, humbling discovery that deferred investment is not avoided investment but compounded investment, is available to Africa as a lesson. The physical form of a billion-person urban future is being decided right now in the street layouts and infrastructure gaps and governance vacuums of cities.

The question is whether African governments and their international partners are capable of learning from someone else's bill rather than waiting for their own.