LAGOS (Nigeria), Nov 29 — John Eromosele records the coordinates of a bustling canal on his smartphone from aboard a dug-out canoe navigating the floating slum of Makoko in Nigerian megacity Lagos. The waterway is “like a boulevard, there’s always traffic here,” the computer coding...
A boy stands on a canoe as part of his daily routine in the Makoko waterfront settlement in Lagos, Nigeria October 23, 2019. — AFP pic
“Most of the streets here don’t have names, and our houses don’t have numbers. Sometimes, you can find up to 50 people using the same number,” said Chief Albert Jeje, one of Makoko’s five traditional rulers.Makoko is dubbed “the Venice of Africa” by some, but its similarity with the romantic Italian city is minimal.
With no administration, the huge labyrinth of waterways has no mains electricity or piped drinking water, no public schools, no hospital, no police station.The mapping project was launched in September with funding from the US-based Pulitzer Centre and a non-profit organisation called Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, which uses free, open-source software.
Like Lagos, with its 20 million inhabitants, the fishing village that sprang up on the site at the end of the 19th century has relentlessly grown, edging into the sea. Clutching her smartphone, one of the volunteers noted the location of a cassava-processing plant on stilts using Code for Africa’s specially developed mapping app.
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