The African Cities Lab aims to develop continued professional development training programmes tailor-made to the needs of urban professionals on the continent.

The initiative comes in response to the extremely rapid growth of African cities and the ensuing need for urban planners trained in the challenges specific to the regions, especially in the areas of urban mobility, resource availability, energy management, water supply and sanitation, and the effects of climate change. The goal is to give urban planners the tools and insight to plan and develop sustainable African cities.

To that end, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) will develop a training platform with massive open online courses (MOOCs) that is intended specifically for urban development practitioners in Africa; in a second phase of the project, the platform will be extended to students. The platform will be hosted at Sèmè City in Benin and managed by project managers across the continent with the assistance of EPFL.

EPFL partners with five knowledge institutions on the continent which includes African Centre for Cities, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco, the University of Carthage in Tunisia, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana and the University of Rwanda.

African Cities Lab is funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs and is scheduled to run for two-and-a-half years.