Fat, speckled catfish writhe in shallow buckets at Tinu Huntontor’s stand in Ajah market in Lagos. Occasionally one flops out onto the ground where it wriggles in a muddy puddle until she scoops it up. Customers come and go, they haggle, they smile and chat, 18 hours a day, almost every day, as they have for decades now.
This work used to support Huntontor’s small family in an informal fishing community on Lagos Lagoon. But for the past two years, Huntontor, 42, has faced additional pressure to provide for her family, which has swelled from five to roughly two dozen.
Urbanization is often considered from a western perspective, with young professionals crammed into megacities, living in pods in ever-taller skyscrapers made from sustainable materials. But it is Africa that will drive global population growth over the next 30 years and how urbanization affects people there now informs how the greatest chunk of humanity will live in 2050.
The story of Huntontor’s family of Egun fishermen, like that of many of the urban poor in Lagos and megacities across the continent, is one of displacement.
The population of sub-Saharan Africa is set to double to more than 2 billion by 2050. The continent is already 43 percent urban, a figure that is set to soar as young job seekers migrate to the cities that are the continent’s economic engines. In Nigeria, more than 40 percent of people are under the age of 14.
The U.N. predicts the country will add 189 million urban dwellers by 2050. Estimates suggest that 10 million more people will flood into Lagos between 2020 and 2035 roughly 10 times the number of people who will become Londoners in the same period.