I’m Researchin’ in the Rain
Just Researchin’ in the Rain,
What a Glorious Project,
And We’re Learnin’ Again.
(With apologies to Gene Kelly and Singing in the Rain)
I recently made a short trip to Zanzibar, the main purpose of which was to connect with friends and colleagues at the Zanzibar Research Centre for Socio-Economic and Policy Analysis (ZRCP). We intended to discuss potential research, edit ongoing research drafts, have lunch, cross fingers our collective fingers in hope about grant applications submitted, and uncross those same fingers again to write new grant applications.
Whilst in Zanzibar I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Africa Urban Lab (AUL). The student cohort for the Africa Urban Lab’s 2024/2025 Professional Diploma in Urban Development has just arrived in Zanzibar for a two-week block of intensive teaching. Between 28th April and the 10th May 2025, they took modules on Urban Economics and Urban Finance.
During my last trip to Zanzibar in November 2024 I was baked by the sun, on this trip I
was hopping over puddles and getting drenched in warm rain. Whilst sitting and listening to the AUL teaching I reflected on this weather. We can learn a lot from the rain: it teaches us valuable lessons about disease, infrastructure, hierarchy, and economic development.
Top row (from left to right): Fumba Town, the headquarters of the AUL; IIT(Madras) Zanzibar campus, where the diploma teaching took place; and Chabala Mulundu, an AUL student from Zambia. Bottom row (from left to right): Abinet Ergando Dube, an AUL student from Ethiopia Astrid Haas (who partly taught the module Urban Finance), celebrating the 3-0 victory of Manchester United over Athletic Club Bilbao; and Frank Kamanga, an AUL student from Malawi.
A Complex Relationship with the Rain
In the 1952 Hollywood film Singing in the Rain, lead Gene Kelly danced and sang his way into cinema legend,
I’m singin’ in the rain
Just singin’ in the rain,
What a glorious feeling,
And I’m happy again.
In the film, rain is an inspiration to escapist happiness, whimsical freedom, and romantic love. Such sentiments are not unique to Hollywood, in India when asked about films and rain (I conducted a two-person survey to ascertain this) a common association is the infamous Tip Tip Barsa Paani rain dance scene in the 1994 Bollywood film Mohra. In Zanzibar by contrast, the rain has long heralded the misery of illness, especially malaria. Malaria is spread to humans through mosquito bites, with symptoms ranging from the mild (fever, chills and a headache), to the severe (fatigue, confusion, seizures, and difficulty breathing), and finally to death. Infants, children under 5 years, and pregnant women are at higher risk of both severe infection and death. In the early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated there were between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria a year, resulting in between 700,000 and 2.7 million annual deaths.
In 2000 90% of the disease burden related to malaria was located in Africa and more than 80 million cases of malaria occurred among African children younger than five years. Approximately 500,000 of these episodes were severe enough to require hospital admission. In 2002, malaria transmission in Zanzibar was as intense as anywhere else in Africa and killed more than 3,000 people a year. The Zanzibari rainy season provided an ideal breeding environment for mosquitos, leading to a spike in malaria incidence between March and June and October to November every year, coinciding with my last two trips to Zanzibar to engage with ZRCP.
Fortunately for us, Zanzibar launched an anti-malaria program in 2003, led by the Ministry of Health and supported by various international partners. The program was both extensive and sustained and encompassed the massive expansion of diagnostics tests and treatments, anti-mosquito spraying, and the free distribution of bed-nets to all children and pregnant women. The scale of the effort was remarkable. In 2021, 712,782 Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) were distributed in Zanzibar, more than the whole of mainland Tanzania (611,717).
The effectiveness of this campaign was astonishing. A study of medical outpatient facilities found a 90% reduction in malaria incidence in Zanzibar between 2000 and 2015. Another study found that between 1999 and 2008, malaria deaths had fallen by 90%, malaria in-patient cases by 78%, and confirmed malaria outpatient cases by 99.5%. By 2010, it was estimated that Zanzibar was averting 660,000 malaria cases and 3,300 malaria-attributable deaths per year. The Zanzibari initiative was rated among the world’s most cost-effective public health interventions. By 2022, the prevalence rate of malaria in Zanzibar was below one percent, lower than anywhere else in Tanzania, or Eastern and Central Africa.
The near-eradication of malaria will help attract foreign investment, enhance the image of Zanzibar to tourists, and support efforts like Silicon Zanzibar, which seek to ease work and residence visas for knowledge-talent and encourage more inward migration to Zanzibar. Moreover, in May 2025, I can interact with researchers at ZRCP safely during the rainy season, thanks to the remarkable success of Zanzibari public policy. Thank you, Zanzibar!
Rain vs Infrastructure
It was an interesting observation, how would the rain affect the ZRCP research or AUL teaching experience? We expect more problems with power and the internet during periods of inclement weather Heavy rain is a notorious disruptor of infrastructure, potentially causing exposed wires to short circuit, damaging electrical equipment and the general power supply, and downing power lines. The AUL teaching certainly was infrastructure dependent, materials transferred to the big screen, microphones attached to teachers collars, students attached to laptops doing class exercises. Bags full of water vulnerable electronic equipment that had to be carried to class every day for set-up. And everything was dependent on the vagaries of the rainy season electricity supply.
City-level infrastructure was a big focus of the AUL teaching, how transport facilitated workers accessing jobs, suppliers accessing firms, and firms accessing local and international markets. African cities are urbanizing at low-levels of income and don’t have the tax revenue to provide city-level sanitation, power-supply, and roads. The course on public finance examined the prospective ability of public and private finance respectively to provide infrastructure finance.
Tanzania has poor quality infrastructure that undermines the ability of firms to produce, transport, and export goods and services efficiently and competitively. According to the 2019 Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum, Tanzania ranked (out of 141 countries) 110th in transport infrastructure, 121st in utilities (electricity and water supply), and 133rd in ICT adoption. Given government budgetary, organizational, and capacity constraints in Zanzibar and Tanzania, it is difficult to improve infrastructure for investors and exporters nation-wide.
Special economic zones (SEZs) may be one way to circumvent this problem. An SEZ is defined as a, “spatially delimited area within an economy that functions with administrative, regulatory….SEZs aim to overcome barriers that hinder investment in the wider economy, including restrictive policies, poor governance, inadequate infrastructure and problematic access to land.” An SEZ theoretically allows infrastructure construction and provision to be targeted to and concentrated in one-location.
The evidence shows that firms choose to join SEZ programs because of the better infrastructure they offer. A 2009 survey of more than 600 firms located in SEZs across 10 countries–including Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania, as well as Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic and Hondura–finds that the most important reason for joining an SEZ in Africa was “cost and quality of utilities.” For ‘firms’, in our case read ‘research institution’.
Unfortunately, too many SEZs in Africa have failed to deliver on promises related to improving infrastructure. In the mid-2010s evidence showed that power shortages were lower in African SEZs than the rest of the economy, but were still very high by global standards. In Tanzania, for example, the average monthly downtime from all causes (not just rain) due to power outages was 95 hours, but still 50 hours in Tanzanian SEZs. In Bangladesh by comparison, the figures were 113 and 6 hours respectively. Enterprise surveys conducted by the World Bank show that electricity-related downtime costs African businesses almost 6 percent of sales, more than 2.5 times the average in OECD countries. Across Africa firms receive more than a quarter of their electricity from private generators which compensates the reliability problem but increases costs of production.
Running classes during the rainy season was a test of Zanzibar’s SEZ program. The AUL is headquartered in Fumba Town, where most of the AUL staff and students are also resident. Fumba Town is nestled in the Fumba Free Zone, an SEZ just south of Stone Town where investors receive special tax and other incentives, easier access to land, a simplified regulatory burden, and crucially, the promise of key infrastructure.
To collective relief, the result wasn’t too bad. The lights never went out, which was evidence that the SEZ program has created some benefits for domestic, and here foreign investors. The week prior, I attended two conferences in Pakistan, and we were regularly plunged into complete darkness, despite being outside the rainy season. However, on occasion, both in Fumba and in the nearby IIT Madras campus where we were teaching, we did hear the generators kicking into action. Expensive private generators, funded by private developers, were compensating for the unreliable national electricity grid…..and ultimately raising the costs and the fees AUL had to charge students.
Africa and Industrialization
After several days of incessant rain, the AUL tired of being a bedraggled democracy (see below) and the AUL Chief of Staff, Heba Elhanafy, and her energetic administrator, Molly Bucknam, purchased and allocated umbrellas for the AUL staff and students. Predictably the umbrellas were Chinese.
Here was a market with extensive local demand (warding off the rainy season) and no response from local manufacturing. Zanzibar is undergoing very rapid urbanization, 4% per annum, but it is not industrializing.
One of the most common refrains in any discussion about urbanization with the ZRCP is that between 2018 and 2050, the African urban population will increase from 548 million to 1.34 billion people. As ZRCP often say, there are good reasons for optimism. Historically, GDP per capita and urbanization have increased together. Countries that experienced an acceleration of economic growth, such as China after 1980, also experienced accelerated urbanization. Cities have historically been drivers of industrialization and economic growth. There are well-established theoretical and empirical reasons to link urbanization to explain these economic benefits – the agglomeration benefits of density. However, since the 1970s, the link between urbanization and industrialization has broken down in Africa. Some economists have even suggested that many African countries are undergoing ‘“premature deindustrialization”.
Promoting local industrialization, especially utilizing agro-inputs, is a government policy priority in Tanzania, Zanzibar, Ethiopia, Zambia, and elsewhere. ZRCP are energetically focused on urbanization and industrialization as a key research priority. Research can help the ZRCP better understand why the decoupling of urbanization and industrialization has occurred and how to more effectively harness the benefits of urban density, including agglomeration, to better help the government of Zanzibar to promote employment-creating, urban-led economic growth.
The Bedraggled Democracy of Rain
As the AUL noted in another blog, students in their first cohort represented eleven different countries: Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia, Guinea, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Spain, and India. This diversity is important to the AUL, as they aspire to build a community of practice around urban development that stretches across East Africa and beyond. This community, they hope, will “foster collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and innovative practices that can transform how cities in Africa are planned, managed, and governed.”
The AUL students come from diverse professional backgrounds, including academia, policy oriented research, urban planning, civil service, and even city leadership. The AUL students also come from all corners of seniority, as the graph below shows. An almost equal number of students arrived with between 1 and 3 years and 10 plus years of work experience.
As AUL Researcher Eva Klaus wrote in an earlier blog, “one of the highlights of the first block was the opportunity to engage with people across disciplinary and hierarchical lines.” Eva suggested that “this mix created a dynamic classroom environment where seasoned professionals could share their insights, while newer practitioners brought fresh ideas. Within the program, hierarchies faded, allowing everyone to contribute equally to discussions and group assignments.”
There was no better illustration of this dynamic than on the first morning of teaching. The rain caught the AUL collectively by surprise. The teachers, administrators and students were huddled into two buses heading into campus, laughing together at the indignity of the rain. Looking from one to the other, it was impossible to fathom any hierarchies–there was just a convivial bedraggled democracy of participation. They were equally and equitably wet members of the AUL. It was moments like this, thanks in part to the rain, that made the AUL work, wonderfully and wetly.
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