The original note, as written at the time
What if we had roads and streets in Kampala parcelled out per city block to private developers? If the people of the block are not happy with the road, the developers don’t get paid.
Ongoing development
Roads and streets in Kampala parcelled out per city block to private developers, with payment conditional on the people of that block being satisfied.
The mechanism is the interesting part: the developer is not paid on completion, they are paid on approval by the residents. That single change moves the incentive from the handover to the following year, which is when a badly built street begins to fail.
It also solves a problem that public procurement struggles with everywhere: nobody knows whether a street works like the people who live on it. They know where it floods, which drain is blocked, whether the surface holds a loaded truck, whether the walk is usable with a pram. A payment condition gives that knowledge a lever.
The risks are serious and they should be named. A block of owner-occupiers is a coherent client; a block of tenants is not, and a block of absentee landlords has no interest in quality at all. So the model works best where tenure is stable, which is exactly where it is least needed.
The second risk is capture. A developer who builds on one block and collects approvals from residents can, over a few years, become the person who decides which blocks get built — a private authority with a friendly name.
So the design needs a public register: what was built, for how much, on whose approval, and what failed afterwards. Publish it and the model becomes a market. Hide it and it becomes a patronage network.
The street is the smallest unit of the city that people can actually judge. That is why this works.