Bridging the Divide: Urban-Rural Linkages as a Pillar for Territorial Partnerships and Collaboration in East Africa
Urban–rural linkages are crucial to achieving sustainable growth. Jackson Kago explores how partnerships between cities and their hinterlands can drive inclusive development in East Africa.
In the rapidly changing peri-urban landscape of sub-Saharan Africa, the divide between urban and rural spaces extends beyond administrative boundaries. It is a dynamic and functional zone of interaction. It is where people, goods, ideas, and livelihoods move back and forth every day.
The peri-urban space exhibits a complex web of cooperation, exchange, and interdependence between urban and rural areas.
Strengthening urban-rural linkages (URLs) is no longer a supplementary concern. It is central in promoting sustainable urbanisation built on inclusiveness and strong communal partnerships among cities and their hinterlands.
The Hurdles to Stronger Links
Although there is growing policy recognition of the URL approach in Kenya and the wider East African region, the path to integration is far from smooth.
One major obstacle is institutional fragmentation. Urban and rural areas are planned and managed as discrete sectors, thus perpetuating sectoral silos in infrastructure implementation, urban management, and service delivery. Development plans, for instance, remain loosely connected, and small and intermediate towns, the very bridging nodes in the urban-rural continuum, often lack resources.
Then there is infrastructure disparity. Rural Roads, often in poor condition, can become unpassable, especially during the rainy season, cutting off farmers from urban markets. Perishable goods such as milk and fresh vegetables suffer post-harvest losses simply because they cannot reach buyers in time. Transport costs rise, mobility falls, and the flow of economic activity between urban and rural zones slows to a crawl.
A third challenge lies in the rapid and often unplanned expansion and transformation of peri-urban areas. As cities expand outwards, property rights are often informal and disconnected, leading to degradation of the environment and consumption of agricultural land.
A Vision for Integrated Territorial Development
To address these issues, city planners need to move towards a paradigm of integrated territorial development where the city and the countryside are functionally but not institutionally or physically separate areas.
The Urban-Rural Linkages Guiding Principles (URL-GP), developed under a global multi-stakeholder process and endorsed by UN-Habitat, offer a pathway for transformation. They advocate locally led, participatory, and environmentally friendly interventions grounded in evidence and human rights.
At the heart of this vision is territorial cohesion: a scenario where intermediary towns and secondary cities serve as hubs for economic diversification and service provision, easing the pressure of urbanisation from major cities while boosting their immediate rural surroundings.
This requires matched partnerships, fiscal inclusion, and inclusive governance—linking municipalities, counties, civil society, and private stakeholders across common functional areas.
A Case in Point: Githunguri “Milk Town” in Kenya
Just north of Nairobi lies Githunguri Town in Kiambu County, with a population of 10,615 people. It offers a vivid example of what strong urban-rural partnerships can achieve.
Once reliant on coffee, Githunguri reinvented itself around dairy. Today, it boasts Kenya’s third-largest milk processor located in its town centre, surrounded by a network of smallholder farmers. The town supports a robust dairy value chain and the milk processing industry that acts as a market and distributor, binding together the urban core and the rural hinterland.
What sustains this transformation? Spatial mobility comes first: the national and county governments have incrementally rehabilitated the roads. Farmers and milk vendors travel by boda bodas (motorcycles), matatus (public transport vans), and handcarts every day across the urban-rural divide as they purchase animal feeds, get urban services, and sell their milk.
Equally important are Institutional partnerships. The Githunguri Dairy Farmers Cooperative Society, owned collectively by the farmers, handles the milk processing, marketingprovision of credit, and support services to the surrounding communities. These partnerships are strengthened by technological adaptations like the M-Pesa digital money transfer platform.
While challenges remain, including infrastructure degradation, the strength of Githunguri’s dairy economy lies in how deeply it is rooted in the local community. At the heart is the milk processing factory in the town centre, drawing in farmers from the surrounding countryside. The cooperative society, rural town and the symbiotic relationship with the rural catchments illustrate how such local economies are capable of shaping territorial development.
Scaling Up Through Global Networks and Partnerships
The lessons from places like Githunguri should not remain local secrets. International city networks and platforms such as city-to-city cooperation may serve as catalysts to scale up such achievements at the local level.
First of all, by creating opportunities for exchange and peer learning, cities can share experiences and adapt successful approaches from elsewhere, for example, Kenya’s dairy cooperatives, and compare them with other successful value chains. Secondly, through technical and financial support to small and intermediate towns, which are often neglected in national infrastructure plans, urban and rural partnerships can be strengthened. And thirdly, partnerships can be strengthened through the incorporation of urban-rural linkages into National Urban Policies (NUPs) and SDG reporting frameworks, with a special focus on SDG 11. a.
A Call to Action
It is time to make rural-urban partnerships no longer voluntary, optional add-ons, but central pillars of sustainable development. National governments should invest in county and local governments with the legal mandates, resources, and capacities for integrated planning. Urban municipalities should also build partnerships and interdependencies with their rural hinterlands and co-design solutions to underlying challenges.
Donors, practitioners, and scholars should enable context-specific research and participatory planning approaches that leverage local resources.
In the end, strengthening urban-rural relationships goes beyond aligning flows of goods, services, and people. It is about building resilient, inclusive, and equitable territories where no one and no space is left behind, a key principle that is central to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the New Urban Agenda (NUA).
