Include Me, Don’t Force Me Out

Lagos is a megacity in south-western Nigeria. The city developed from a coastal village to be one of the fastest growing cities in the world with an estimated population of 23,305,971 in 2015 and an annual population growth rate of 3.2%.

This is due to Lagos been the major economic and former administrative capital of Nigeria.

Factors such as high rate of urbanization with limited or no development, inaccessibility to land and poor policies led to high slum proliferation in Lagos.

Two out of three residents in Lagos live in slum like conditions.

Many life cycles of slum residents revolve within slums in Lagos, that is they live, work, and even relax in their slum.

Many slum management practices in Lagos involve slum clearances which require forceful eviction of slum residents from their homes, without any consultation nor provision of alternatives.

The cleared slum land area is then frequently utilized for building high income residential homes, which many slum dwellers cannot afford.

This has led to an increase in poverty, homeless, death and new slum development within and at the outskirts of the city.

There have also been some attempts to upgrade some slums in Lagos.

The Lagos Metropolitan Development and Governance Project (2006-2013) and the Isale gangan housing development are examples of such upgrading projects.

However, these projects had no significant impact on the slum dwellers nor slum growth.

This was attributed to, among other factors, limited or no involvement of slum residents during project development.

Thus, there is an important call for increasing slum dwellers engagement during slum upgrading projects.

Based on our experience working in slums in Lagos, we believe that slum dwellers know more about their problems than any other third party. Similarly, they can identify solutions and how to achieve them.

But the challenge here is that there are diverse groups of people living in slums and their needs in many cases are different. Also, based on slum dwellers length of stay in the respective slum, their goals may be either short or long term.

In addition, individual problems may cause discord during meetings which thus affect participatory decision making.

Furthermore, self-interest of corrupt community leaders has prevented sustainable actualization of some slum upgrading projects.

So the status quo remain for many slums in Lagos.

In 1969, Sherry Arnstein wrote an article called "A ladder of citizen participation". In the article she described eight types of participation in decision making.

She developed the ladder based on the controversy (at that time) in the description of citizen participation and at what level we can categorically say citizens have total control over decision making.

There is no denying the fact that residents’ participation in slum upgrading will yield better results.

But to overcome the lapses of residents’ participation, we believe it is vital to identify when and at what level residents should be involved in the planning and implementation of any slum upgrading projects.

It is on this note we proposed a framework that gives different types of partnership that can be employed at each level of a planning process for upgrading projects in slums.

This, we hope, can efficiently manage the challenge of residents’ participation in slum upgrading project and can support achieving the SDG 11.1 goal of cities without slums by 2030.