I told him that I wanted to research private schools in poor areas of Lagos. He dismissed this idea straightaway: “There are no private schools for the poor. In Nigeria, private schools are only for the elite.”Read more at location 657
I visited Nigeria to meet with the University of Ibadan team; we went into the slums of Lagos and found private schools—everywhere, just as in India.Read more at location 658
He said they definitely weren’t there, not in Nigeria and, by implication, not in any other country. So I dropped the issue and we went on to other matters, and further beers.Read more at location 673
“That’s Makoko.” This was exactly the kind of place that I wanted to visit, to find private schools. “You won’t find private schools there!” he laughed, outraged at the idea.Read more at location 682
In any case, he added, “Too dangerous.” In fact, he’d never visited, but said that it definitely wasn’t safe for outsiders to venture. “There’s no police there, anything goes,” he said, with a finality that he felt should have been the end of the matter.Read more at location 683
I was in Lagos training the University of Ibadan team who would be collecting data on the proportion of students in public and private schools and to learn as much as possible about the nature of the low-cost private schools and how they compare with their public counterparts.Read more at location 689
An official report said that Lagos State, with 15 million people making it the sixth-largest global city, was “faced with a grave urban crisis,”Read more at location 692
classify areas as “poor” or “nonpoor,” with the former featuring overcrowded housing with poor drainage, poor sanitation, and lack of potable water, and prone to occasional flooding.Read more at location 695
we trained them to go out and search for all the primary and secondary schools in the selected areas.Read more at location 700
Lanre had found government lists of public and recognized private schools, but we told the researchers they were on their own as far as unrecognized private schools were concerned. We told them to comb every street and alleyway in the urban areas, visit every village and settlement in the rural surrounding areas, looking for private schools. Be warned, we said, they won’t necessarily have signboards advertising their existence: in Nigeria, there is a hefty tax on signboards, so school owners often prefer to go without.Read more at location 700
Afterward, they were to ask if they could do a brief, unannounced tour of the schoolRead more at location 706
there was only one place that I wanted to go to see for myself: Makoko.Read more at location 710
Men sitting on doorsteps started calling, “Oyinbo” (white man). Children playfully joined in the chorus: “Oyinbo, oyinbo, oyinbo!’Read more at location 715
The paved road ended at a speed bump; beyond was just a track so muddy that it was impassable for our vehicle.Read more at location 723
We picked our way carefully. The street was flooded from the previous night’s rains. The open sewers along either side had spilled out into the road;Read more at location 726
