Transferable Urban Governance Lessons from UK Post-Grenfell Building Safety Reform for Rapidly Urbanising Sub-Saharan African Cities

In the study of how cities work, there is a quiet but deadly assumption that often goes unchallenged: that if a building falls down, it is because the engineers made a mistake with the math or the materials were weak. This view treats a collapse as a simple failure of physics, a broken beam or a cracked foundation. However, a growing body of research suggests that in rapidly growing cities across sub-Saharan Africa, the problem is rarely just about the steel or the concrete. It is about the system that surrounds the building. This system includes the rules that govern construction, the people who are supposed to check the work, the supply chains that deliver materials, and the digital records that track what is being built. When these systems fail to function, even a well-designed building can become a trap. The question of how to keep cities safe as they expand is no longer just an engineering challenge; it is a test of how well a city can govern itself.

A new paper by independent researcher Christian Okwudili Eze tackles this exact problem by looking at a stark contrast between two worlds. On one side are the cities of sub-Saharan Africa, where building collapses are tragically common. In Nigeria alone, 43 separate building failures were recorded in 2024, and over 221 have been documented since 1974. Similar patterns of fatal accidents appear in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Senegal. On the other side is the United Kingdom, which faced its own catastrophic building safety crisis in 2017. The Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed 72 people, exposed a regulatory system that had stopped working while still looking functional. In the years since, the UK has undertaken one of the most thorough overhauls of building safety laws in recent history. Eze's work asks a simple but difficult question: Can the lessons learned from rebuilding the UK's safety system be transferred to African cities, or are the two contexts too different to compare?

The researcher approached this by gathering and analyzing 87 different sources, including academic studies, government reports, and official inquiries, spanning from the year 2000 to 2025. The goal was not to simply copy the British laws and paste them onto African cities, but to understand the underlying principles of the UK's reforms and see how they could be adapted to fit the reality of African urban governance. The study found that the barriers to safer cities in Africa are not primarily technical. The laws and regulations often exist on paper. The problem is that the systems to enforce them—such as the capacity to inspect sites, the authority to prosecute violations, and the digital tools to track construction—are missing or broken. The paper argues that the solution lies in fixing these governance systems, not just in designing better buildings.

To make this connection clear, the paper proposes a new framework called the UK–Africa Building Safety Transfer Framework. This model breaks down the complex issue of building safety into five distinct areas, or pillars, and matches a specific failure found in African cities with a corresponding solution from the UK. The first pillar is the regulatory framework. In many African cities, building codes exist, but they are fragmented and rarely enforced. A developer might get a permit for a fifteen-story building and then quietly add six more floors, confident that no one will notice or that nothing will happen if they do. The UK response to a similar lack of oversight was to create a "Gateway" system. This acts as a series of hard stops in the construction process. Before a project can move from design to construction, or from construction to occupation, a specific regulator must explicitly sign off. This forces the developer to pause and prove safety at every stage, rather than assuming safety and hoping for the best.

The second pillar deals with professional accountability. In the UK, the new laws require that a specific, named individual—rather than just a company—takes legal responsibility for the safety of a building's design. This person cannot be swapped out easily, and they must prove they are competent. In contrast, the paper notes that in Nigeria, there is no federal law requiring a certified structural engineer to be involved in a construction project. This means that critical decisions about foundations and load-bearing walls can be made by unqualified people. The paper suggests that African cities could adopt the UK principle of named liability, requiring that a registered engineer be officially appointed and held accountable for every multi-story building, a change that would cost very little to implement legally but would drastically change the incentives for developers.

The third pillar focuses on the supply chain. In many African construction markets, counterfeit cement and substandard steel bars are widespread because there is no mandatory testing before materials are used. A building designed to be safe will still collapse if the materials used to build it are fake. The UK is moving toward a system where all construction products must be assessed before they enter the market. The paper points out that African nations already have standards organizations capable of doing this testing, but they lack the legal mandate to make it compulsory. By requiring verified materials for all publicly funded projects, city governments could immediately improve the quality of the supply chain without waiting for national laws to change.

The fourth pillar addresses how cities learn from their mistakes. After a building collapses in many African cities, there is often a political statement, a few arrests, and then silence. There is rarely an independent, technical investigation that determines exactly what failed and why. The UK's response to Grenfell was a seven-year inquiry that produced a detailed, public report with specific recommendations. The paper argues that African cities do not need to replicate the length of that inquiry, but they do need the principle: an independent body with the power to investigate fatal collapses and publish its findings. This turns a tragedy into evidence that can prevent future deaths.

The final pillar is digital governance. In the UK, the government used its power as a major buyer of construction services to force the industry to adopt Building Information Modeling, a digital tool that creates a detailed 3D record of a building. This makes it harder to hide unauthorized changes, such as adding extra floors to a structure that was not designed to hold them. In sub-Saharan Africa, the use of such digital tools is minimal. The paper suggests that African cities could follow the UK's lead by requiring digital records for all public construction projects. This would create a transparent history of every building, making it much harder for developers to bypass safety rules.

The study concludes that the gap between the safety of buildings in the UK and in African cities is not a gap in technology or even in legislation. It is a gap in political will and institutional capacity. The paper explicitly rules out the idea that African cities need to wait for a complete overhaul of their national laws before they can make progress. Instead, it finds that city governments in places like Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra have the existing authority to implement many of these changes immediately through local planning regulations and procurement rules. They can set up the "Gateway" checkpoints, mandate the appointment of named engineers, and require material testing for public projects without waiting for national parliaments to act.

Ultimately, the paper presents building safety not as a niche engineering problem, but as a fundamental test of urban resilience. A city that cannot prevent its buildings from collapsing under normal conditions is not resilient, no matter how well it plans for floods or heat. The research suggests that by adapting the governance principles of the UK's post-Grenfell reforms, African cities can build the systems necessary to protect their residents as they grow. The evidence indicates that the tools to solve this crisis are available; what is needed is the decision to use them. The paper ends with a sobering reminder that while the UK took seven years and 72 deaths to change its system, the evidence for doing it differently and sooner is now available for cities that are ready to act.