Urbanization has placed considerable constraints on the preservation and maintenance of formal green spaces in African cities. This situation has given attention to the potentials of informal green spaces (IGS). While studies on IGS in African cities is only emerging, scholarly and policy attention to children’s perceptions and use of IGS within Africa’s spatially expansive urbanism is limited. This study explores children’s perceptions, use, barriers, willingness, and suggestions for improving IGS in the peri-urban area of Funda in Luanda. Based on semi-structured interviews and focused-group discussions, the study revealed that, while IGS offered different ecosystem services, not all IGS were accessible to children, due to safety concerns, maintenance conditions, and parental restrictions. Children’s interest in maintenance activities and suggestions for improving IGS reflected their independent identities, sense of place, and cognitive capacity to contribute to planning their community. The paper submits that the potential role of IGS in Africa’s peri-urban areas can be improved by taking into account children’s agency and experiential knowledge of community spaces. For this reason, there is a need to recognize and engage children as co-producers of community knowledge and interventions.

Freetown, Sierra Leone, is confronted with health risks that are compounded by rapid unplanned urbanisation and weak capacities of local government institutions. Addressing them implies a shared responsibility between government and non‐state actors. In low‐income areas, the role of community‐based organisations (CBOs) in combating health disasters is well‐recognised. Yet, empirical evidence on how they have utilised their networks and coordinated community‐level strategies in responding to the COVID‐19 pandemic is scant. This paper, based on a qualitative study in two informal settlements in Freetown, employs actor‐network theory to understand how CBOs problematise COVID‐19 as a health risk, interact with other entities, and the subsequent tensions that arise. The findings show that community vulnerabilities and past experiences of health disasters informed CBOs' perception of COVID‐19 as a communal emergency. In response, they coordinated sensitisation and mobilisation programmes by relying on a network of actors to support COVID‐19 risk reduction strategies. Nonetheless, misunderstandings among them caused friction.

Intra- and inter-regional migration is widely described. Prior studies have attribute varied reasons for this development including the quest for greener pastures and unequal development in northern Ghana. What has escaped critical scrutiny is some migrants’ ability to escape extreme rural poverty, albeit in harsh urban environment. Such a missing gap can potentiate high policy failures, hence the need for academic attention. Using a mixed method, we focus on two informal daily livelihoods as exemplars – exceptionalism – in Accra. We see their embedded organisational vitality and dynamic networks as illuminating for good livelihood practices, proper city governance and fostering economic empowerment. We call on city authorities to take cognisance of such complexities and heterogeneity of production–labour relations, failure of which can spell doom for policies ostensibly initiated to curb migration, as they are likely to be underpinned by factual inaccuracies and may result in ill-fated interventions.