A Day at Lagos's Dustbin Estate

One rarely sits when your job requires you to rove all and around your world to tell stories about it. I recently visited Ajegunle, a community in the sprawling city of Lagos, Nigeria.
In this small community lies an estate of wooden, polythene and zinc roofed shacks built on refuse of about 16 feet deep.

Dubbed the "Dustbin Estate,'' this place used to be a swamp but in the quest for survival, human activity began in the area over 25 years ago.

For lack of money to do a proper sand filling, people resorted to piling heaps of refuse to make a sturdy foundation for their homes.   
Here residents pay between 1500 naira to 2000 naira (7 to 9 USD) monthly for a room, while others can pay between 100,000 to 200, 000 naira (502 - 1005 USD) for a piece of land to erect their own building.In the Ajegunle district of Nigeria's sprawling city of Lagos, lies an estate of wooden, polythene and zinc roofed shacks built on refuse of about 16 feet deep.

At the Dustbin Estate

35-year-old Fausat Ayanshola has been living here with her husband and five children for 15 years. Ayanshola who cooks in front of her home, and then hawks the food from street to street says she decided to live where she can afford to pay for it.

    "The reason I'm living here is because I don't want people to start speaking ill about my family and I saying all sorts like I am living with a friend, my children are misbehaving is the major reason I am living here," Ayanshola said.

Property in Lagos, a heaving metropolis of around 21 million people can be among the most expensive in the world with two-bedroom flats costing more than one million US dollars in upmarket areas.
A two-bedroom flat in some locations could rent for up to 150,000 US dollars a year, but they remain vacant as most people cannot afford the rent and landlords are unwilling to bring the price down.

With the hope that the best opportunities remain in Lagos, people continue to migrate to the city increasing unemployment and creating a housing shortage.
 Housing experts say Lagos needs over 15 million units of building to adequately house its teeming population expected to hit the 25 million marks in 2025.

To deal with the growing demand, the Lagos state government has embarked on several housing projects, but progress has been slow, and the supply is still way below what is needed.
Districts like this, which is bordered on the west by two of Nigeria's biggest seaports, are home to millions of urban poor and rural migrants of different ethnic groups.

Fifteen-year-old Emmanuel Arogbola and his family moved here three years ago when they could not continue to pay their rent in Lagos' government seat of Ikeja, although his parents have been able to cover their part of the house with sand, the stench coming from the canal behind his house still leaves him nauseous.
     "Sometimes this canal normally smells here, normally irritates everywhere. Everybody will just go inside. Lock the window, lock the door, and everybody will just be inside. somebody can't stay here at night to have some fresh air," Arogbola says.

For Razak Bogunbe, whose role model is Bill Gates, he is not getting the much-needed social development that he desires.   
"I want to leave this place because this place is not socialized and I want to become a computer engineer and my role model is Bill Gates," says Bogunbe.
     

I met 33-year-old Tolulope Sangosanya and she is the founder, "Love of the Street" (LOTS) foundation which she began in 2005.
Labelled the Mayor of Dustbin Estate, she clothes, feeds, and teaches the very less privileged kids, and has the only functional toilet facility that caters for the community.

With Tolu Sangosanya (LOTS Founder)

 "When I started, 70 per cent of those who were coming to the LOTS resource centre when we started free literacy classes on the refuse dump proper couldn't read and write. They could write, they could copy things from the board, but it had no meaning to them and it's amazing how the same thing that I helped solve in this community was something that happened to me. I had dyslexia as a child, I couldn't read until I was ten and my grandfather helped me learn how to read and write for 2 years and the same strategy my grandfather used is exactly what I used in the community," Sangosanya says.
    

Inhabitants here defecate in the open, while high-end residents use pit that discharges into the open canal.

Although residents here confess to an unusually high immunity against most air and water-borne diseases, experts warn that a little outbreak can trigger an epidemic.

"Someone who is residing in a refuse dump environment is at risk of developing cholera at a very fast rate. Take for instance if one of those people residing in that environment should pick up the cholera bacteria, it is very easy for them to disseminate the disease among people living in that environment and that will cause a kind of epidemic or a pandemic if care is not taken," warned Olanihun Oluwatosin, a medical doctor at a state-run medical facility.

                                     

     Desmond Majekodunmi is an environmentalist, "There will be far less waste there if people would adopt the principles, the three R principles of reduce, reuse and recycle. We've got to reduce our consumption, that's a global problem and we have to reduce, and we have to reuse. But the issue of the dustbin estate, it's an issue of good governance at the end of the day. There must be social safety nets for people like this," he explains.
  

Lagos, one of the most populous cities in Africa produces over 10,000 tonnes of waste every day of which most are organic waste that can be converted to power, and some are plastic bags and bottles which can also be converted to plastic pellets used for different items.

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