The Guardian | “Demolished future: How Otumara, Baba Ijora demolition contradicts Lagos Project Zero”
Gbenga Salau’s story exposes how the demolition of homes and schools in Otumara and Baba Ijora has disrupted the education of hundreds of children, forcing many out of school and into street trading, child labour and precarious living conditions. The report argues that the evictions undermine Lagos State’s Project Zero initiative to eliminate out-of-school children.

New Telegraph | “Okun Alfa: Caught between raging ocean and Lagos’ urban ambition”
Juliana Francis’s report explores how coastal erosion, ocean surges and displacement continue to threaten residents of Okun Alfa. It highlights how the Eko Atlantic project and other activities worsened environmental vulnerabilities, destroying homes, livelihoods and public infrastructure, while exposing tensions between elite urban development and the rights of coastal communities to housing and sustainable livelihoods.

Daily Trust | “Contaminated water in Lagos community inflicts deadly illnesses on children”
Eric Dumo’s report reveals how residents of Ago Egun, a Lagos waterfront settlement, face a deadly public health crisis from contaminated water and absent sanitation infrastructure. Children suffer frequent diarrhoea, typhoid and dysentery, with several dying in disease outbreaks. Despite over ₦66.9 billion spent on water infrastructure since 2019, Lagos State Water Corporation meets only 35% of daily demand.

Punch | “Inside Lagos’ waterfront housing crisis where development displaces communities”
This documentary, produced by Melony Ishola, examines the lingering human cost of Lagos’s waterfront demolitions. It follows displaced Makoko residents still living in boats and makeshift shelters months after their displacement, while exploring the city’s broader housing crisis and the uncertain fate of relocation promises made to affected communities.

These commissioned reports have gained some promising attention to date, including responses from the Ministry of Housing’s head of information, the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board’s management and the Lagos State Commissioner for the Environment and Water Resources, along with increased collaboration across media titles and wider public commentary.

Five key lessons emerged from the workshop and subsequent mentoring scheme:

1. Training enhances clarity and alignment.

2. Capacity strengthening remains necessary, even for experienced journalists.

3. Collaboration facilitates access and improves story development.

4. Community reporters require additional support to maximise impact.

5. Multimedia and documentary content amplifies story engagement.

Following the publication of the commissioned stories, we will continue to monitor and track government responses to the published reports. The success of the initiative has also generated strong interest from Nigeria’s media industry, with leading news organisations, including The Guardian, Premium Times and News Central Television, expressing interest in a collaborative platform to enable journalists to jointly report on urban development challenges. This growing momentum presents an opportunity to build a network of newsrooms committed to reporting on urban issues.

Header image credit: Composite of news reports

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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This is acute in urban areas, where those living in informal neighbourhoods lack access to public services, dense housing built from cardboard and wood is a fire risk, and livelihoods are dependent on access to energy. Many residents are tenants, which is an added complication in accessing electricity, as the landowner can block direct access to the utility (and subsidy).

In Kampala, ACTogether is working with the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda to transform access to grid electricity.

The government of Uganda has recognised the importance of access to clean energy through three subsidy and financing frameworks. The government is using a cooperative model to increase the likelihood that resources reach the residents of informal settlements. However, to date, progress has been slow.

This blog post introduces the subsidies that exist already, explains that they do not work, and describes how ACTogether and the Ugandan Slum Dwellers Federation are working to address this deficit in inclusive programming.

Existing subsidy models

1. Electricity Connections Policy (ECP): Launched in 2018, the ECP aims for a 60% electrification rate by 2027 by providing “free” connections to households situated within 35-90 metres of a pole. While the connection itself is subsidised, households must still meet the costs of internal wiring and obtaining a wiring certificate. The official connection application involves inspection fees of UGX 23,600-41,300. Research findings show that residents pay an average of UGX 86,620 in informal “fees” and UGX 100,000-200,000 for a wiring certificate, in order to bypass delays manufactured by official surveyors and inspectors (technical gatekeepers) during inspections.

2. Price Subsidy Programme: This is a market-driven initiative whereby the state provides 30-70% discounts on clean energy technologies like solar systems and clean cooking solutions. The subsidy funds go directly to pre-qualified energy service companies (ESCOs) to lower the upfront purchase price. Uptake in informal neighbourhoods is low, due to a lack of affordability and a lack of information. To be eligible for the discounted price offered by this programme requires a national ID and proof of ability to pay. However, individual applicants in informal settlements often lack the financial literacy or initial capital to engage with ESCOs alone.

3. Government credit lines via participating financial institutions (PFIs): The Uganda Energy Credit Capitalisation Company (UECCC) provides low-interest loan programmes through PFIs like Centenary Bank. These loans are intended to cover the expensive “house wiring” hurdle that excludes low-income households from the formal grid. However, loans are often inaccessible to informal residents, who lack the formal assets and/or credit history required.

Powerful political interests are well-served by the current system

Despite the government’s commitment to inclusive energy, the presence of powerful informal actors means that financial gain (rentseeking) dominates the process of accessing electricity. These informal actors include:

> Technical gatekeepers (surveyors and inspectors employed by the utility), who hold considerable power. They often “manufacture delays” during technical inspections to solicit informal payments.

> Informal brokers (Kamyufus), who are frequently former utility trainees or staff and now provide speedy informal access to the grid. They may charge a monthly fee (approximately UGX 10,000) regardless of consumption.

> Property owners (landlords), who often use Kamyufus to bypass delays in the formal system. They charge tenants marked-up rates of UGX 10,000-20,000 a month.

> Utility staff/installers (Musombwa), who are formally employed engineers working with informal brokers to connect residents. Staff extract fees from applicants, typically UGX 100,000-200,000, for connections.

Who are the important agencies?

ACTogether Uganda and the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda (NSDFU) are coordinating a coalition to address these problems. They act as “navigators” for the process. Alongside providing professional support, they also focus on:

> Building trust – Bridging the communication gap between suspicious residents and formal utilities to overcome the “transparency deficit”.

> Social collateral – Leveraging organised informal settlement dwellers into community collectives to provide the social guarantees that replace individual credit history, making residents “bankable” for formal lenders.

UEDCL (the state-owned distributor) is a vital member of the coalition, ensuring technical integrity and grid stability. It has two significant contributions to make:

> Bulk service deals – The coalition aspires to negotiate bulk deals and discounted rates from UEDCL for the community collectives, rather than dealing with fragmented individual applications.

> Setting technical standards – Collaborating to institutionalise the “ready board” as a standardised technical solution for bypassing expensive housing-wiring requirements.

The Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) provides the critical urban planning framework that allows the initiative to move from a pilot to a city-wide system. Its role includes:

> Regulatory alignment – Ensuring electricity access is integrated with other urban systems like water and road access.

> Local approvals – Validating the residency of applicants and providing “letters of no-objection” for placing shared infrastructure in communal spaces.

The Ministry of Energy (MEMD) and UECCC provide the “vertical integration” needed to align community needs with national fiscal frameworks, focusing on:

> Formal recognition – Securing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that recognises community cooperatives as legitimate intermediaries for the national Electricity Access Scale-up Project (EASP) and the results-based framework.

> Risk mitigation – Developing framework agreements with PFIs like Centenary Bank, where the coalition helps define how the fund acts as a collective guarantor.

Improving outcomes through collaboration

Led by ACTogether and NSDFU, the coalition seeks to:

> Improve access for tenants through landlord–tenant negotiations – Standardising legal consent through agreements that protect a tenant’s investment in equipment, while securing the landlord’s permission for formal connection.

> Introduce a multi-stakeholder transparency dashboard –A low-tech, high-transparency digital interface (SMS/USSD/web/app) to track application status and eliminate “manufactured delays” and unofficial fees. With digital clarity, enabled through a real-time process tracker, the proposal seeks to strip technical gatekeepers (like surveyors) of the discretionary power they currently use to solicit informal fees.

> Challenge residents’ isolation and aggregate applicants into organised, credit-ready cooperatives – This process begins by identifying existing community associations and organising them into electricity cooperatives. Many of these associations are NSDFU women-led savings groups. These associations undergo capacity-building sessions focusing on financial literacy, leadership and the use of digital tools to foster self-reliance and trust.

The cooperatives help to bridge the complex requirements of national programmes – like UECCC and the EASP – with the lived realities of informal neighbourhoods. By enabling the utility to work with aggregated demand and bulk applications, it will be easier to challenge informal payments demanded by technical gatekeepers.

In addition to creating and capacitating cooperatives, ACTogether and NSDFU are also seeking to transition Kamyufus from “illegal actors” into certified agents to improve safety and response times. The project plans to select and certify ten to 15 experienced Kamyufus to act as official liaisons between the utility and the cooperative. This turns a “security threat” – brokers who tampered with legal meters to force residents back into illegal arrangements – into a “service asset” under a regulatory framework.

Photo credits: ACTogether Uganda

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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Header photo credit: afhunta / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). View of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

AI statement: Microsoft Copilot was used to help produce a first draft of this summary blog post. This draft was then extensively edited by the communications team and approved by the author of the article.

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Header photo credit: Folasade Tolulope Ogunsola

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

Generative AI was used to help draft this blog post: The authors used Claude AI to help arrange/align ideas and revise grammar. This version was then reviewed and edited by the ACRC communications team, before being approved by the authors.

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Going on to examine each dimension in detail, the paper emphasises the importance of industrial sub-sector and spatial location in shaping how each dimension impacts an HME, using examples from the research across the five cities. In summary:

1. Formalisation – Critiquing the standard view that informality is chosen by HMEs, the paper argues that state-imposed formalisation, construction and management of market spaces are impractical. HMEs ignore formalisation, taxes are not collected, and HME locations are shaped by customer patterns rather than state orders.

2. Factor supplies – Aside from micro finance institutions, informal savings clubs and mobile money, HMEs often face financial exclusion, forcing them to rely on informal moneylenders. Ecosystems of interdependent institutions, policies and organisations that share a common purpose are therefore needed for both entrepreneurial training and financial literacy, but different ecosystems are needed for different types of HME.

3. Hybrid governance – Formal and informal rules and regulations co-exist for HMEs, with both based on the threat of violence. Informal groups including gangs, political party members or traditional authorities impose charges or “transfer rents” on HMEs – as often do formal state-linked agents, in addition to official fees. Some informal regulation systems, such as market queens in Accra, may also hold legitimacy for HMEs and residents.

4. Agglomeration – Literature on agglomeration in African cities tends to focus on congestion and its impacts – directly on productivity, and indirectly on health, crime and land values. But recent analysis showing that agglomeration benefits exist applies to HMEs too, as seen with sub-sectoral collocation in both services and manufacturing. The reasons include sharing (collective input acquisition), matching (lower transaction costs for customers and manufacturers), and learning from knowledge circulation (usually within sectoral clusters).

5. Value chains with larger firms – HMEs interact extensively with formal firms – both vertically in the same value chain (VC), and horizontally across a single product market. Many HMEs will be pushed towards codified business practices through VC inclusion, while their role in formal sector VCs may affect the latter’s profitability. HMEs have limited power over input and output pricing, and while their negotiation power is linked to their potential switching costs, those organised within a VC can jointly press for greater benefit.

6. HME organisation – While many national, regional or city-based HME associations have large membership numbers, they are not well-consolidated or strongly representative of HMEs. Their policies tend to be “lowest common denominator”, rather than specific to different members’ needs. The paper argues that “indirect formalisation” through registering highly localised networks could be a more useful way to address issues around infrastructure, market spaces, financial inclusion, public tenders and everyday politics.

Strengthening policy around HMEs

In each city, many people continue to earn their livelihoods by running HMEs or working for HMEs run by family members – and there is no sign of this changing significantly in the near future. HMEs provide an important service to consumers in their neighbourhoods, helping them to manage poverty. There is also a strong gender dimension, as women tend to run these enterprises out of necessity.

The paper argues that we need to look at HMEs not as a homogeneous group, but in a more differentiated way. This involves not only distinguishing HMEs from larger firms, but also from each other – in terms of sector, spatial location and gender, as well as their approach to risk and their markets. A “one-size-fits-all” approach cannot work across a whole city; instead, a “bottom up” approach is needed to inform policy and shape successful outcomes for HMEs.

Header photo credit: Diana Mitlin. Market stallholders in Accra, Ghana.

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Photo credits: World Urban Forum

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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By Joy Birungi and Rosebella Apollo

ACRC held a cross-project learning workshop in Kampala during the last week of April 2026, bringing together the Kampala city team, representatives from the action research (AR) projects, and members of the senior management and central uptake teams.

Activities over the two and a half day workshop served as both an inspiration and a brain teaser, pulling reflections from the past research phase and highlighting learnings that could inform ACRC’s implementation phase in Kampala.

Participants were organised into four functional teams – writers, community knowledge, AR leads and research uptake – to allow inclusive involvement and full exploration of group capacities.  As a result, they were able to gain substantial clarity on the mandate of ACRC, the core pillars, domains and application of the ACRC theory of change, and overarching influence on state policy, programming and practices.

Through quick fire panel discussions, functional team group discussions, world café presentations and fishbowl conversations, teams embarked on robust reflections about the ACRC journey – interrogating bright spots, challenges and possible ways of strengthening collaborations and forging integrated reform agendas.

Key learnings

Stakeholder engagement

Within AR projects stakeholder engagement was reported to have worked well, especially capitalising on existing relationships as probable entry points to key government offices. Pre-project preparations, such as preparing project profiles and framing key messages, acted as hooks for target stakeholders. In other instances, there was need to create and build new relationships critical to project outcomes, acceptability and continuity.

During discussions, it was noted that conducting discussions with stakeholders deepened insights of action research scooping studies, and that stakeholder mapping was helpful in identifying individuals who were well-aligned to influence specific policies and programming. Research teams conducted comprehensive community stakeholder mapping to determine potential community gatekeepers, devising strategic ways to engage these stakeholders to ease entry and enable local buy-in. For example, public markets required preauthorisation from the leadership at the City Hall to engage any market officers, dwellers and vendors. Likewise, teams had to continuously update the stakeholder matrix based on state and community feedback to ensure engagement remains relevant.

The importance of aligning ACRC Kampala projects with Uganda’s National Development Plan IV and Uganda’s Vison 2040, in addition the UN Sustainable Development Goals and African Union, was noted as a key reform entry point.

Power of community knowledge

The contribution of community knowledge leads in navigating community politics was undisputed.

“Community knowledge team was a great bridge between project researchers and community leaders and dwellers.”

Creative use of informal knowledge sources – such as community volunteers and Kamyufus, who do not have legal mandate but prove resourceful in mapping and capturing ground practices – enriched the documentation of AR projects. However, during the workshop, researchers were reminded to be more flexible and patient while dealing with various community dynamics for project entry and acceptance. Several communities are often influenced by cultural norms and beliefs, political parties and natural attitude towards strangers for fear of eviction.

Additionally, ACRC’s collaborative research approach supported communities and stakeholders to champion their own solutions through co-design workshops for the different projects. Plans to establish and steer dialogues between government agencies and communities through existing and emerging platforms would push the community agenda into the elites’ view.  To sum it up, good entry strategies, patience and collaboration were a few of the requirements to work effectively with communities in Kampala.

Leveraging political opportunity structures

In the months before the AR projects commenced, Uganda underwent an active electioneering period – challenging timely access to key state officials, quality participation from informal settlement residents and uptake pathways for ACRC projects in the city. Collaboration across teams was central to navigating politics within the research process and ensuring neutrality. AR teams worked with each other on entry points, shared probable bottlenecks and collectively devised actions and strategies to manage contestations. Although the political season presented a fair share of setbacks, the learning meeting drew attention to potential opportunities, including rekindling relationships with incumbent officials, opportunities to align with emerging priorities and seizing active policy windows.

ACRC theory of change as a roadmap

Teams gained overall clarity of how specific projects feed into the overall ACRC mission and theory of change (ToC).  The workshop amplified need to design and develop cross-project plans and strategies, looking at engagement processes, documentation and communication outputs together. Participants discussed how the AR project approach ensures citizen mobilisation, through community participation coordinated by local leaders, which in turn is supported by the elite commitment to drive change.

In terms of elite commitment, this is shown by the inclusion of evidence from AR projects in revisions of national policies, programmes and regulations. A case in point is research findings from the CLASK project informing local government induction trainings and policy consideration for land matters.

Opportunities for the emergence of reform coalitions were identified, such as within the markets, and there is potential for both mainstreaming coalitions across different projects and deepening understanding around building state capacity – the final component of the ToC.

> Co-learning and co-creation of knowledge

The writers group committed to a learning agenda to cross-fertilise ideas and lessons across different functional teams. Most importantly, this is set to involve a collaboration between community knowledge team members and researchers that goes beyond documentation, to incorporating learning and co-producing knowledge.

> Desire for a joint multistakeholder engagement

Building on comprehensive stakeholder mapping to establish common interest and requests, different project teams could attend stakeholder meetings together to pursue common interests. For example, engaging with city authorities and ministerial bodies cuts across all projects. This approach would address a number of bottlenecks and failed attempts in gaining stakeholders’ attention and participation.

Developing and implementing a city stakeholder engagement strategy, plans and budget could facilitate this, by outlining project structuring processes and stakeholder needs, with participation from the uptake lead, AR leads and researchers. A detailed stakeholder database could also be created for easy retrieval of contact information. 

> Joint communication and documentation

Many teams shared a desire to sharpen communication and dissemination activities in Kampala – from developing a toolkit to share best approaches, to adopting more community-centric communication outputs to increase access to information and capture community voices, to producing podcasts. Functional teams also shared aspirations to tell a city story, moving away from traditional action research stories.

Kampala’s overarching reform agenda

All in all, the workshop provided the groundwork for team Kampala to start looking at the AR projects as building blocks that are contributing to a bigger change process. As the curtains closed on the learning meeting, an important ask for the team was to think through a citywide reform agenda – mapping potential shifts and changes and weaving these into a coordinated effort to push the reform frontier.

Photo credits: Rosebella Apollo

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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Presentation of ACRC’s Lagos city report

Taibat Lawanson, Professor of Planning and Heritage at the University of Liverpool, UK, presented findings from ACRC’s Foundation Phase research in the city, which she led from the University of Lagos (UNILAG). She explained that researchers examined nine major systems that determine how cities function. These include water supply, sanitation, transportation, health, education and energy, alongside food distribution, finance and digital connectivity. They found significant gaps in access to essential services, particularly for residents living in informal settlements.

According to the research, proximity to formal systems often determines access to essential services, leaving many urban residents underserved. On access to water, Taibat noted that although the Lagos State Government provides about 40% of the state’s daily water supply capacity, only about 30% of residents currently have access to public water.

WASH interventions and community-led governance

The co-lead of ACRC’s Lagos WASH project, Oluwaseun Muraina, explained how the initiative adopts community-led governance and social enterprise financing to improve water and sanitation services. Using the Okerube community as an example, she described engagement meetings held with community leaders, residents and landowners, culminating in a town hall discussion. She also highlighted a peer learning exchange visit to the Mukuru community in Nairobi, where the team studied existing solutions and explored lessons that could be adapted to the Nigerian context.

Waste management and community health

Team lead for the Lagos waste management project, Deji Akinpelu, spoke about the critical need for local government involvement in waste management. He advocated for a community-centred approach that prioritises community health over political expediency. He also issued a call for stricter enforcement against illegal refuse dumping, particularly on expressways, noting that the current situation is not sustainable.

Communicating research for public impact

The commissioning editor at The Conversation Africa, Wale Fatade, delivered a practical session on communicating research, arguing that academic findings should move beyond scholarly circles and be accessible to the public and policymakers. He noted that researchers too often publish in inaccessible journals using technical jargon. He challenged journalists to bridge the gap by converting dense academic work into clear, digestible content across formats such as news articles, features, and podcasts. He stressed that simplicity is the benchmark of genuine understanding.

Experience from the field

The managing editor of The Guardian Nigeria, Chinedum Uwaegbulam, drew on his experience covering property and environment to reframe stakeholder mapping as a strategic journalistic tool. Rather than a simple contact list, he argued that a well-constructed map shifts reporting from reactive event coverage to systems journalism, revealing power dynamics, conflicts of interest, and regulatory gaps behind the headlines.

Using Lagos as a case study, he walked participants through key actors spanning government regulators, international financiers, vulnerable waterfront communities, and informal sector workers. He stressed that combining stakeholder maps with data sources such as budget allocations and floodplain records enables evidence-based accountability reporting.

The regional coordinator for sub-Saharan Africa at SciDev.net, Ogechi Ekeanyanwu, framed science reporting as a mindset challenge rather than a technical one, encouraging journalists to translate broad research findings into human-scale stories and to build personal relationships with researchers to facilitate clearer communication.

The Guardian Nigeria’s weekend editor, Kabir Garba, cautioned against recycled data, urging reporters to interrogate why statistics remain unchanged over time and to focus reporting on accountability and the impact on neglected communities.

On her part, Thomson Reuters Foundation correspondent, Bukola Adebayo, challenged journalists to refresh tired narratives around evictions and demolitions by focusing on victims’ experiences and pursuing government accountability. She strongly advocated for multimedia storytelling as a more powerful means of audience engagement than text alone.

The board secretary for the PDM Network, Omobayo Azeez, thanked the participants for their engagement, the partners for their support, and the presenters for their generosity. He expressed a strong hope that the relationships forged would endure for the future of journalism in Nigeria and Africa, by extension.

Strengthening urban development reporting

The workshop successfully fostered meaningful exchange between journalists, researchers, and development practitioners, strengthening the bridge between academic research and urban reporting. Participants left with practical frameworks and a renewed commitment to in-depth reporting on housing, environment, and WASH in Lagos.

Photo credits: Tobi Fayelu

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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Header photo credit: Nairobi co-research team.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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What the evidence shows

Research conducted by LVCT Health, the University of Nairobi and ACRC points to a viable path forward. Key findings include:

> School feeding improves learner concentration, enrolment consistency and overall wellbeing.

> Parents in informal settlements have indicated a willingness to contribute a modest amount of money for the school feeding programmne – up to KSh 20 per meal.

> At that contribution level, the programme could generate approximately KSh 1.2 billion annually – a potentially self-sustaining model that could be integrated with the Dishi na County programme.

> Broader benefits extend to parents, who regain time previously spent on meal preparation as well as savings from the school meals.

Recommended actions

Based on workshop discussions and study findings, the following steps are proposed:

> Extend the Dishi na County programme to cover APBET schools in informal settlements.

> Set meal contributions at a level that families can realistically afford – KSh 20 or below.

> Invest in shared infrastructure, including access to clean water, appropriate cooking energy and adequate food storage.

> Ensure that no child is excluded from meals due to a missed payment.

Looking ahead

The validation workshop demonstrated the value of bringing lived experience and research evidence into the same room. The conversation was grounded, practical and solution-oriented. With strong community willingness and a growing evidence base, there is a real opportunity to build a fair and sustainable school feeding system that works for all of Nairobi’s learners – regardless of which school they attend.

Photo credits: Rosebella Apollo

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

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