Lagos: Slums, Sanitation & Environmental Pressure
When Growth Outruns Planning
Lagos gains roughly a million extra residents a year, but its road network, water mains and sewerage system have not kept pace. The result is a city of stark contrasts — gleaming high-rise neighbourhoods like Lekki sit a short drive from slums with no piped water and open drains. The challenges that come with this kind of growth fall into four big groups: housing, services, jobs and crime, and the environment.
Managing Urban Growth: Slums and Squatter Settlements
Around two-thirds of Lagos residents live in some form of informal housing. The most famous slum is Makoko, a stilt community built directly on the lagoon. Around 100,000 to 250,000 people live there in wooden houses raised above water that is contaminated by raw sewage and waste from sawmills. Houses go up without planning permission — called squatter settlements — and there is no formal land title, so families have no protection from sudden demolition. In 2012 the Lagos State Government bulldozed parts of Makoko, leaving thousands homeless. The pressure to build, on any spare patch of land, never stops.
Around two-thirds of Lagos lives in slums or squatter settlements. Makoko is built on stilts over a polluted lagoon and houses 100,000–250,000 people without formal land rights or piped water.
Clean Water, Sanitation and Energy
Lagos’s formal water supply reaches a minority of homes — estimates suggest only around 10% of residents have a reliable mains tap. The rest buy water from private boreholes, tankers or sachets known as ‘pure water’, often at much higher cost per litre than mains supply. Sewerage is even patchier: less than 10% of the city is connected to a treatment system, and most waste flows into the lagoon untreated. Cholera and typhoid outbreaks happen most years.
Electricity is unreliable, even in wealthier districts. Power cuts of several hours a day are routine, so businesses and middle-class households run small generators. Diesel and petrol generators are a major source of urban air pollution and a constant background noise across the city.
A counter-intuitive truth about Lagos is that poor families pay more per litre of water than wealthy ones. Mains water is cheap, but most slum residents have no mains connection — they buy from a tanker or vendor at several times the price. The same pattern applies to electricity: well-off neighbourhoods have generators to cover the gaps, while many slum households simply go without when the grid fails. Inequality in Lagos is not just about wages — it is also about the price of basic services.
Healthcare and Education
Lagos has impressive healthcare facilities — Lagos University Teaching Hospital is one of the leading hospitals in West Africa — but most slum residents cannot easily reach them. Private clinics dominate the wealthier districts; public services are stretched. Schools tell a similar story: state primary schools are overcrowded, with classes of 80 children not unusual, and many slum children attend informal schools run by churches or charities. Drop-out rates rise sharply in secondary school, when families need teenagers to work.
Unemployment and Crime
Although Lagos creates new jobs every year, the population grows faster than the formal economy. Open unemployment is officially around 10–15%, but underemployment in the informal economy is far higher — many street sellers and motorbike-taxi drivers earn far below a living wage. Lagos has long battled organised crime; armed robbery, extortion and the so-called ‘area boys’ gangs concentrate in poorer districts. Police-community relations are tense in places, although crime rates have come down from the peaks of the early 2000s.
Around 10% of Lagos has a reliable mains water connection. Less than 10% is on a working sewer system. Power cuts force daily generator use, polluting the air and pushing up household costs.
Environmental Pressure: Waste, Water and Air
Lagos generates around 13,000 tonnes of solid waste a day. Only about 40% is collected; the rest piles up in informal dumps, blocks drains and ends up in the lagoon. The Olusosun landfill on the edge of the city is one of the largest in Africa and regularly catches fire, sending choking smoke across the city. Air pollution from generators, traffic and burning rubbish gives Lagos PM2.5 levels several times above World Health Organization guidelines. Water pollution is worse still: untreated sewage, industrial waste and oil contamination drain into Lagos Lagoon, killing fish stocks and contaminating coastal fishing communities.
Lagos has fewer than 10 metres of road per resident — one of the lowest figures of any megacity. Commuters call the resulting gridlock the ‘go-slow’. A typical journey of 20 km can take three hours during rush hour. Drivers idle their engines, burning fuel and adding to air pollution; lorries queueing for Apapa port can wait days to load. The economic cost of lost time runs into billions of naira a year, and it falls hardest on workers in the informal economy who are paid by the day.
Why These Challenges Matter
Slums, broken water systems, polluted lagoons and gridlocked roads are not separate problems — they are connected. Sewage in the lagoon is a housing problem, a sanitation problem and an environmental problem at once. The next lesson looks at how Lagos is fighting back: with planning, with self-help projects like the Makoko Floating School, and with new transport schemes designed to lift quality of life for the urban poor.