Informal Workers in Lagos Are Left to Cope With Devastating Floods Alone: Why Things Must Change

There have been four major floods in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic hub, over the past 14 years. The floodwaters swamp the open-air markets of Oshodi, one of the city’s largest informal trading centres, and rise through the stilted walkways of Makoko, a waterfront community of about 100,000 people built over the Lagos Lagoon. This disrupts the livelihoods of thousands of market traders, street vendors, waste recyclers and artisans.

These informal traders, most of them women, sell fish and other food, textiles, tools and household goods from stalls. They survive on daily, irregular incomes with no contracts, insurance or savings to fall back on when disaster strikes.

Each set of floods is devastating. The 2012 floods displaced an estimated 2 million people in the Lagos area alone. The 2019 floods also caused severe community displacement across Lagos’s informal settlements. The 2022 floods affected more than 24,000 households in Lagos State, with over 1.3 million people displaced across Nigeria. And the 2022-23 floods displaced about another 8,000 residents in Lagos State. Informal settlements and open-air markets were among the hardest-hit areas.

I am a sociologist and urban researcher and set out to understand how informal workers’ survival strategies could guide the development of flood resilient cities.
In 2023 and 2024, I met with 45 informal workers in Lagos, Makoko, Oshodi, and Lagos Island to find out how floods affected their livelihoods and households, the strategies they used to cope and recover, their sources of support, and what they thought of the government’s response to the floods.

Read more:
Lagos city planning has a history of excluding residents: it’s happening again

The informal sector of Lagos employs about 76.3% of the city’s workforce. Take it away, and the city stops functioning.

My research found that in the main, the state does not step in to help after the floods. Blocked drains are not cleaned out, and communities living on floodplains don’t receive new flood protection – such as raised embankments, flood barriers, improved drainage channels, or early warning systems that could give residents and traders time to move goods and families to safety before waters rise.

Instead, I found that the people doing the real work of disaster response and urban resilience in Lagos are the informal workers – market traders, street vendors, waste recyclers and artisans.

I argue that the state needs to stop treating informal workers as a nuisance (through demolitions of informal markets, forced evictions of settlement residents, and the routine exclusion of street traders from urban planning decisions) and start recognising them as the essential urban actors they are. The government can do this by extending legal protection to the workers, setting up flood proof infrastructure for them to work from and offering informal workers a seat at the table where decisions affecting their city are made.

What I found in the field

The people I interviewed were far from passive victims waiting for government help.

They had developed their own systems of knowing who to call, where emergency money would come from, when to move goods to higher ground, and how to keep trading as floodwaters rose. They ran their own disaster management, in a system of sophisticated, self-organised urban governance in action.

As Alhaji Musa, the chairman of market traders’ association, told me:

We organised our members to clean drains and pump out water. We contributed money to buy sandbags for the most vulnerable stalls. The government did not come for three days, so we had to act for ourselves.

The informal workers said they’d found several different ways to earn a living. When the market was flooded, they could do other work. Women traders, for example, combine market activities with home-based food processing, tailoring, or hairdressing that can continue even when the market is under water.

As Amina, a 38-year-old market trader in Oshodi, put it:

I sell vegetables in the market, but I also process palm oil that I can sell when the market floods … You cannot depend on just one thing in Lagos.

The informal workers said they also rely on kinship ties, religious communities, hometown associations and, most powerfully, the ajo or esusu, a rotating savings group. When flooding destroyed one trader’s stock last year, her savings group paid her early so she could restock. There was no paperwork or waiting. This helped her get back on her feet within days, without queuing at a government office or waiting for a payout that might never arrive.

Read more:
Many African countries are flooding, risking decades of development if they do not adapt

My research also found that the informal workers knew which streets would flood first when heavy rains hit, which routes stay open, and where salvageable materials wash up in clusters after the waters recede. This knowledge is not written down anywhere. It is held collectively, passed through networks and mentorship, and it is worth more in a crisis than an official hazard map.

Another powerful adaptation strategy was the workers’ collective organising, accomplished through trade associations. As Kemi, a trader and association leader, described it:

We are not just sitting and waiting for government. We organised our members to meet with the local chairman. We demanded that they clean the drains before the rainy season. When they did nothing, we organised a peaceful protest. Only then did they send workers to clean some of the drains.

Finally, informal workers engage with government relief programmes, build relationships with local officials, and partner with non-governmental organisations when the opportunity arises, but without ever dismantling their own community networks (their safety net).

What needs to happen next

The informal workers’ adaptive strategies are impressive. But these approaches should not need to exist. It is unfair that these workers are seen as resilient because they are left to survive the same precarious conditions over and over as the state has failed them.

Their informality is used to justify excluding them from the protections that formal citizens receive – a pattern documented across urban Africa, where workers without formal contracts, registered businesses or legal tenure are routinely omitted from social protection schemes, disaster relief frameworks and urban development plans. This is what makes them vulnerable.

Drawing on the concept of “bouncing forward”, which means not simply restoring communities to their pre-flood state (bouncing back) but transforming them entirely, I argue that the government must move informal traders towards more secure livelihoods through:

• secure land tenure for market traders and residents of informal settlements, so that they can invest in flood-proofing without the constant fear of eviction

Read more:
Nigeria should tackle poverty rather than hound hawkers off the streets

• improving drainage systems, flood defences and waste collection
• giving informal workers representation on urban planning and disaster committees
• designing social protection schemes where disaster payouts could be made through existing trade associations.

The informal workers of Lagos are already managing risk, sustaining economic life, and building social solidarity under conditions that would overwhelm most formal institutions. They clearly contribute to making Lagos resilient to climate change. The question is whether Nigerian cities, governments and planning systems will finally choose to recognise, resource and learn from that contribution.

Gbenga Akinlolu Shadare does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Read More at the Source