Lagos: Sanitation and the Clean Cities Challenge 

SOStainabilityWeekly

Edited by Oke Epia, E-mail: sostainability01@gmail.com  | WhatsApp: +234 8034000706

Spotlight

Lagos has always been a city of contradictions, economic ambition sitting side by side with fragile infrastructure, rapid growth colliding with environmental strain. For years, its climate story was not told through policy documents or global summits, but through everyday realities: flooded streets after a few hours of rain, polluted waterways, and, perhaps most tellingly, the quiet persistence of open defecation in parts of a megacity. But today, that story is beginning to shift, and interestingly, one of the clearest entry points into Lagos’ climate progress is something as ordinary and as revealing as the reform of public toilets.

To understand why the current reforms matter, you have to confront what Lagos looked like before now. For decades, sanitation in Lagos reflected a deeper structural failure. Access to clean water was limited; only a small percentage of households had reliable, safe water sources within their premises. That gap forced people to depend on informal systems: boreholes, water vendors, or contaminated sources. Sanitation followed the same pattern. Public toilets were few, often poorly maintained, and in many cases unsafe or too far from where people lived. As a result, open defecation became a coping mechanism rather than a choice.

Harsh realities of Lagos life

Waste routinely found its way into drainage systems, worsening the city’s already fragile flood management. During heavy rains, blocked drains turned streets into rivers, destroying homes and livelihoods. Water contamination increased the spread of diseases like cholera and diarrhoea, conditions that disproportionately affected children. Women and girls faced an even harsher reality. The lack of safe sanitation exposed them to risks of harassment and violence, particularly at night. It also affected dignity and education; girls often missed school during menstruation because there were no safe facilities available. At a broader level, poor sanitation contributed to environmental degradation. Polluted lagoons, methane emissions from unmanaged waste, and public health crises all fed into Lagos’ climate vulnerability. But this is where the narrative begins to change.

Toilets as climate infrastructure

The Lagos State government is pushing to expand public toilets with over 1,700 installed across the state as part of efforts to end open defecation. This signals more than a hygiene campaign: it represents a shift in thinking that sanitation is no longer just a social service but a climate infrastructure. When waste is properly managed, it reduces contamination of water bodies, protects ecosystems, and prevents drainage blockages that worsen flooding, especially in a coastal city like Lagos, where rising sea levels and extreme rainfall are growing threats. The reform also reflects a broader strategy outlined in the Lagos resilience and climate frameworks, which explicitly link sanitation, wastewater management, and urban planning to climate adaptation. The goal is not just to build toilets, but to integrate them into a system that supports a healthier and more climate-resilient city.

Beyond the toilets story

Something has shifted in Lagos. It did not happen instantly, and the transformation is far from complete. But the direction of travel has changed and changed decisively enough to demand serious attention from the rest of Nigeria and from Africa’s policy community more broadly. Under Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the Lagos State Government has moved from reactive crisis management toward something more deliberate: a suite of interconnected climate and environmental initiatives that, taken together, represent the most ambitious urban sustainability programme any Nigerian state has mounted. The toilet reform sits at the centre of this story not because toilets are glamorous, but because they are foundational. They reveal where a government’s stated priorities and its lived reality either converge or diverge.

What makes Lagos’ approach noteworthy is that sanitation reform is part of a wider ecosystem of climate-aligned projects. Take the Ojodu Infrastructure Improvement Project, a model initiative that combines sanitation, water access, and clean energy. In Ojodu, new public toilets are being installed in markets and healthcare centers, directly reducing open defecation and improving hygiene for thousands of daily users. But the project goes further; it integrates solar power into public health facilities, replacing diesel generators and cutting emissions. It also introduces sustainable water systems, ensuring that sanitation facilities actually function as an often-overlooked challenge. This layered approach reflects a deeper understanding: infrastructure cannot be isolated. Water, sanitation, energy, and health systems must work together.

Across the state, other efforts reinforce this direction. The strengthening of enforcement agencies like the Lagos State Environmental Sanitation Corps has helped tackle indiscriminate waste dumping, a major contributor to flooding and pollution. Environmental sanitation exercises, urban clean-up campaigns, and waste regulation policies are gradually reshaping public behaviours, even if inconsistently. Meanwhile, Lagos’ climate adaptation plan outlines over 30 major projects spanning waste management, transport, water systems, and community resilience—an ambitious attempt to position the city as a model for urban sustainability in Africa.

The UN SDGs at the core 

The government itself has acknowledged as much and is attempting to address the gap through several significant partnerships and approvals. In November 2024, the Lagos State Government approved the construction of 100 new public toilet units across the state, embedded within the Lagos State Resilience Strategy, which aims to ensure toilet and bathroom access in every one of the state’s 57 Local Governments and Local Council Development Areas. Governor Sanwo-Olu personally committed to this during World Toilet Day 2024, whose theme, “Use the Toilet and Have Peace,” was described as underscoring the urgent global sanitation crisis.

Then in March 2025, the state went further still. In collaboration with WaterAid Nigeria, Plan International, and private operators, the government announced plans to construct 350 additional public toilets across Lagos. WaterAid’s Lagos State Programme Lead, Dr. Adebayo Alao, projected that the partnership’s interventions would directly reach 10 million Lagos residents and indirectly benefit another 17 million by 2028, a scale of impact that, if delivered, would reshape the sanitation landscape of the city. According to the Lagos State Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, construction had already commenced at some identified locations by the time of the roundtable in March 2025.

The government has also professionalized the sector. A training programme for public toilet operators has been held at Ikeja, with the state registering over 635 operators, training 250 toilet operators and janitors, and upgrading 16 private-public toilet facilities. The state’s four-pillar sanitation roadmap, spanning advocacy, standardization, and regulation, bridging the infrastructure gap, and monitoring with enforcement, now provides a policy framework that, at least on paper, treats sanitation as a governance priority rather than an afterthought. Between June and July 2025, at least 21 individuals were prosecuted for open defecation, demonstrating that enforcement is being taken seriously alongside infrastructure expansion.

What is striking is how closely these efforts align with global development priorities. At the centre is Sustainable Development Goal 6, which directly addresses access to safe water and sanitation—long a challenge in Nigeria. Poor sanitation is not just an environmental issue; it is a public health crisis that fuels disease outbreaks. But the impact extends further. These reforms support SDG 11 & 13 by making Lagos more livable and resilient and by reducing environmental risks and strengthening adaptation systems.

They also connect to SDG 3, particularly in reducing disease burdens linked to poor sanitation, and SDG 10, given how disproportionately these issues affect low-income communities. Lagos itself has identified sanitation, energy, and urban resilience among its priority SDGs, signaling a deliberate alignment with global frameworks.

There are, however, real accountability concerns that honest reporting must surface. A media report cited the Lagos State Government Budget Implementation for the third quarter of 2025, which showed that only 11.4 percent of the allocated sum for toilet construction was spent within nine months. The implementation report did not specify how many facilities had been completed or in which locations they were installed. Additionally, most public toilets currently in operation are run by private individuals who reportedly charge users  N200 per visit, meaning a person who needs the toilet five times in a day pays a N1,000, a sum that is far from trivial for the urban poor. The Lagos State House of Assembly in February 2025, called specifically for the availability of free public toilets statewide. It is not clear if that demand has been met.