The first thing you notice about Makoko is the water.
It is everywhere, beneath your feet, reflecting the grey morning sky, carrying the weight of thousands of lives lived in a place the rest of Lagos sometimes forgets. Canoes slice through narrow channels. Children peer from doorways that open directly onto the lagoon. The air smells of salt and smoke and something harder to name, the particular scent of a community that has learned, generation after generation, to make a home out of what little the world has offered.
Last Thursday, our team made our way into the heart of this floating community to visit six of our beneficiaries. We came to check in, to listen, and to see for ourselves how the children we serve are faring. What we found, as we always find in these moments, was more than we expected.
Finding Blessing
We will call her Blessing, though names in a place like Makoko carry a kind of defiant poetry all their own.
She is nine years old. She has her mother’s eyes, sharp, watchful, full of quiet intelligence. When we arrived at the small wooden structure her family calls home, she was sitting near the window, a worn exercise book open on her lap. She looked up without surprise, as though she had been expecting us, and gave us the kind of smile that does something to your chest.
A year ago, Blessing had never sat in a classroom. She spent her mornings helping her mother sort fish, her afternoons watching younger siblings, her evenings in the half-dark of a home without consistent electricity. School felt like something that happened to other children, children on the mainland, children whose parents had regular incomes, children who did not live on water.
Then IA-Foundation came.
What It Takes to Get a Child to School
It sounds simple when you say it: getting out-of-school children back into quality education. But nothing about it is simple.
In Makoko, the barriers are not one thing. They are everything at once. They are the cost of a school uniform and the cost of transport across the lagoon and the cost of school materials that a family living at the margins simply cannot afford. They are the belief, sometimes spoken, sometimes simply understood, that a girl’s education is a luxury the family cannot prioritise.
They are the exhaustion of parents working six, seven days a week and still not having enough. They are the absence of schools nearby, and the presence of water between here and anywhere else.
Every child we work with has had to cross all of these barriers. Our team, our community mobilisers, our volunteers, our partner schools, has had to cross them too, alongside these families.
When we sat with Blessing’s mother, she told us something we have heard in different words from many parents in communities like this one. “I always wanted her to go,” she said. “I just didn’t know how.”
That is the gap IA-Foundation exists to close.
The Visit
We moved from home to home across the morning, visiting all six of our beneficiaries, navigating narrow walkways and the gentle sway of platform boards underfoot. At each stop, we were welcomed with the particular warmth that communities like Makoko extend to those who show up consistently, who do not arrive only with cameras but also with follow-through.
We checked on learning progress. We listened to what was working and what was hard. We distributed materials where they were needed. We answered questions from parents who are invested in their children’s futures in ways that poverty has never been able to fully extinguish.
We met a boy who, few months ago, could barely hold a pencil. He wrote his name for us, slowly and carefully, and then looked up with the expression of someone who has just discovered a superpower.
We met a teenage girl who told us, matter-of-factly, the way young people sometimes say the most significant things, that she wants to be a nurse. She said it without apology. She said it like it was simply a fact about her future that she had decided.
These moments are why we do this work.
Why Makoko, Why Now
Makoko is one of the largest informal waterfront settlements in West Africa, home to an estimated 85,000 to 250,000 people, figures that vary depending on who is counting and how. It sits on the edge of one of Africa’s most prosperous cities, a few kilometres from Lagos Island’s gleaming towers, and yet it exists in a different world entirely: underserved, under-resourced, and under-counted.
The out-of-school crisis in Nigeria is not abstract. Our country has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world. Millions of children children like Blessing, like the boy who wrote his name, like the girl who wants to be a nurse, are growing up without access to the education that could change the entire arc of their lives.
They are not out of school because they lack potential. They are out of school because the system has not yet reached them.
IA-Foundation’s work is about closing that distance.
Coming Back
As we prepared to leave Makoko that Thursday afternoon, Blessing found us again. She had something to show us: a drawing she had made in school, a house surrounded by trees, with a bright sun in the upper corner, the universal grammar of a child’s hope, rendered in coloured pencil.
She pressed it into the hands of one of our team members. “For you,” she said. “Because you came.”
We carried it with us back across the water.
This is what we came to Makoko to find, not to confirm what we already know about poverty and inequity, but to see, up close, what is possible when a child is given a chance. When a community is met with consistency and genuine care. When the gap between where a child is and where they could be begins, slowly and irreversibly, to close.
How You Can Help
The work we do in Makoko, and in communities across Lagos, depends on the generosity of people who believe that every child deserves an education, regardless of where they were born or how they live.
If this story moved you, please consider taking action today.
Donate to directly fund a child’s education at www.ia-foundation.org
Become a Monthly Giver and provide consistent, reliable support to children like Blessing
Share this post and help us reach more people who care about education equity in Nigeria
Together, we can make sure no child is left behind, not in Makoko, not anywhere.
IA-Foundation is a Lagos-based nonprofit dedicated to getting out-of-school children back into quality education.
Learn more about our work at www.ia-foundation.org.
