In the Africa.com article “The Top 10 Most Livable Cities in Africa”, I was excited to see the city that I currently reside in — Accra, Ghana — listed as the second most livable city in the continent. As you might guess, it’s many of the continent’s main attractions that find themselves on the list — both Cape Town and Johannesburg, in South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Gaborone, Botswana; and Tunis, Tunisia are just some of the upscale cities that find themselves on the list [see the article to read the full list].

One of the challenges I’d like to pose is to the article’s very perspective on “livability” — and how that influences which cities end up on this list. While the editors acknowledge that they considered both quantitative and qualitative factors in their determinations —  “availability of goods and services, quality of infrastructure, and overall security (which is defined both…