UrbanBetter: Building the Infrastructure for Africa’s Intellectual Capital
By Tony O.Lawson
During a morning run in Dakar, Dr. Tolullah Oni noticed a man doing push-ups in the middle of a busy traffic roundabout.
Surrounded by traffic and vehicle emissions, he was exercising in an environment that made healthy living more difficult.
As a physician and urban epidemiologist, Oni had spent years studying how cities influence health. Air quality, mobility, access to public space, food systems, and the built environment shape people’s wellbeing every day. The experience crystallized a question that would eventually lead to the creation of UrbanBetter.
“Health isn’t primarily made in hospitals,” she says. “It’s made, or damaged, through the air people breathe, the ways they move, the food they can access and the environments they experience every day.”
Today, Oni is Founder and CEO of UrbanBetter and the first Black woman appointed to a full professorship at the University of Cambridge in the institution’s more than 800-year history.
Through UrbanBetter, she is building civic and intellectual infrastructure that helps African cities generate evidence, strengthen institutions, and improve public health through collaboration.
Building a Knowledge Economy
Across Africa and its global diaspora, researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, scientists, and professionals hold deep expertise and institutional experience. Connecting that expertise with priorities identified across the continent continues to rely heavily on personal introductions and informal professional networks.
“I think the simplest answer is that money has clear infrastructure, while knowledge, as a form of capital, doesn’t,” Oni explains.
UrbanBetter’s ongoing Diaspora Intellectual Capital Pulse Survey reflects strong interest among diaspora professionals who want to contribute their expertise. Participants consistently identify trusted partnerships, structured opportunities, dedicated resources, and institutional relationships as the resources they need most to deepen their engagement.
Years of research also revealed recurring challenges within African cities. Communities often have limited influence over decisions affecting their neighborhoods, cities frequently lack neighborhood-level evidence to guide policy, and research partnerships often lose momentum when individual projects conclude.
UrbanBetter addresses those challenges through three connected initiatives.
Cityzens provides civic infrastructure by equipping young people and communities to generate local evidence and engage decision-makers.
The UrbanBetter Academy provides intellectual infrastructure through research, training, mentoring, and institutional partnerships across Africa and the diaspora.
Within the Academy, the Diaspora Knowledge Hub connects expertise with priorities identified by African institutions, creating structured pathways for collaboration across research, policy, and leadership development.
Together, these initiatives create what Oni describes as hope infrastructure—the systems, relationships, and institutional capacity that help communities build healthier urban futures.
Central to this work is brain circulation—the movement of expertise across institutions, countries, and sectors. Researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and technical specialists contribute knowledge through mentoring, collaboration, policy exchange, and implementation, allowing expertise to circulate across Africa and its global diaspora.
“The point is to connect different forms of expertise,” Oni says, “without assuming one side is always the expert and the other the recipient.”
Connecting Global Africa
UrbanBetter’s model is already shaping work across African cities.
Through the Lagos Cityzens Hub, young people documented air pollution, walkability, and mobility, strengthening engagement with the Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (LAMATA). That work evolved into a three-year, £1.98 million Wellcome Trust-funded partnership involving LAMATA, the University of Lagos, the African Diaspora Centre for Healthy Urban Futures at the University of Cambridge, and UrbanBetter to study heat, health, mobility, and the built environment.
UrbanBetter has also expanded the model to Freetown, where diaspora experts supported grant-writing efforts that helped secure funding for youth-led air quality research, strengthening the city’s capacity to generate locally relevant evidence and inform public decision-making.
Oni envisions stronger collaboration among universities, governments, entrepreneurs, communities, civil society, and the private sector. UrbanBetter provides the connective infrastructure that enables those institutions to work together around shared priorities.
Over the next decade, she hopes African institutions will have trusted pathways for identifying expertise, building partnerships, and collaborating across borders, while researchers, city leaders, entrepreneurs, and communities contribute more directly to global conversations on urbanization, climate, health, and development.
UrbanBetter is currently raising $6 million to expand its civic and intellectual infrastructure across African cities and strengthen collaboration throughout the global African diaspora.
For Oni, the work extends beyond a single organization. It reflects a broader vision of institutions that enable knowledge, expertise, and partnerships to circulate across Global Africa, creating stronger foundations for healthier cities and future generations of leaders.
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