Time reports a work in progress but talk about a “Grand Challenge”
“It would be hard to pick a tougher city to make over than Lagos. The place is more normally known as a living, breathing definition of anarchy. With 10 million to 18 million inhabitants — no one is quite sure — Lagos is the biggest city on the world's poorest continent and one of its fastest-growing, with the population expected to be as large as 25 million by 2015, which would make it the third largest city in the world. Those figures describe an unmatched concentration of poor people. About 65% of Lagosians — up to 11 million people — live below the poverty line, earning $2 or less a day. This is chaos at its ugliest, deadliest and most colossal: a malarial megalopolis mostly built of driftwood, tin and cardboard, with precious little running water, electricity, employment or law and order, where the ground is filled with garbage, the water with sewage and the air with the noise and smog from a million unmuffled exhausts. “
“That counterintuitive approach resonates with Fashola. When he looked at Lagos as its new governor, he says, "in everything I saw, I saw opportunity. The infrastructural deficit of Lagos [is also] a chance to relieve its poverty. If there is a bad road, it means we need an engineer and laborers, architects, valuers, land merchants, banks, merchandisers, suppliers of iron rods and cement, and food courts." So Fashola embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of Lagos' infrastructure, building new expressways, widening and resurfacing others, stringing streetlights along all the main highways, integrating road with rail, air and even water. The city was too big to transform overnight, but improvements were soon marked. Traffic slackened, garbage dumps were replaced with green parks, the proportion of Lagosians with access to clean water rose (from 30% to 59%) and flood defenses covering 10.8 million people were strengthened. Eventually Fashola created tens of thousands of jobs in construction and municipal projects — 42,015 jobs in environmental and waste management alone. New state skills centers trained an additional 250,000 people in new trades, then offered them microloans to set up their own businesses.”
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