By helping enterprises be more productive and providing households with more job opportunities and schools for their children, among other reasons, urbanization has been a major driver of growth and development in Côte d’Ivoire. More than half of the Ivorian population live in cities, with an urbanization rate of around 5 percent per year.

Yet as the West African country sets its sights on halving poverty and achieving upper-middle-income status by 2030, there is broad recognition that realizing those objectives will require that the government set the country’s rapid urbanization on a more resilient path. Vital infrastructure such as solid waste management and basic sanitation have failed to keep up with rapid urban growth. Combined with a lack of proper land use planning, this has led to environmental degradation while also increasing the country’s vulnerability to natural hazards such as floods.

In response to these challenges, the City Resilience Program (CRP), a partnership between GFDRR and the World Bank, has been helping Côte d’Ivoire achieve more resilient urban development. This support has focused on facilitating the country’s access to private sector financing and expertise for resilient urban solid waste management. A key contribution of CRP has been its efforts to facilitate engagement between Côte d’Ivoire and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) on the scope of a potential public-private partnership for the operation of resilient solid waste management facilities.

In June 2024, the government of Côte d’Ivoire signed a transaction advisory services agreement with IFC, marking a significant step toward structuring a potential future publicprivate partnership. Through this agreement, Côte d’Ivoire can mobilize transaction support expertise from the World Bank Group’s private sector financing arm that would otherwise be challenging to source effectively within the country’s existing public procurement frameworks.

Under the agreement, IFC will work with Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Sanitation to help design, structure, and competitively contract a public-private partnership to build and operate resilient solid waste management facilities. These facilities will potentially serve approximately 1,350,000 people in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s largest city, and two secondary cities—one in the Central region and the other in the Northern region.

In facilitating Côte d’Ivoire’s engagement with IFC, CRP has drawn on evidence-based models for sustainable financing and operations and maintenance of resilience investment projects to help the country understand the rationale for the potential publicprivate partnership and the most critical technical and financial issues and challenges involved in bringing this to fruition. These include volume and flow of waste, sources and uses of funds, institutional responsibilities and regulatory framework, and the potential market for future private sector operators. For example, CRP has highlighted that, in Côte d’Ivoire, the solid waste management system must ensure collection and transport of sufficient volumes of waste for private sector operators to process at landfills to ensure the economic viability of investments.

CRP’s support for resilient urban solid waste management is only one part of the program’s longstanding engagement with Côte d’Ivoire. For example, it has also supported efforts to assess riskinformed land-use planning in Ivorian cities and model extreme heat in Abidjan. These efforts will continue to drive and inform national and municipal initiatives to increase the resilience of urban areas across Côte d’Ivoire. CRP-supported analytical work on solid waste management in Côte d’Ivoire has informed preparation of the Urban Resilience and Solid Waste Management Project, which received a $315 million commitment from IDA. Through fiscal year 2027, the project is designed to reduce vulnerability to flooding and strengthen solid waste management in selected urban areas in Côte d’Ivoire.