Research

This study elicits narratives of home from previously unhoused adolescents in Lagos, Nigeria to understand how housing insecurity interacts with adolescent development. A common manifestation of housing insecurity in Lagos is the creation of informal settlements often called “slum communities”: a cluster of shanty houses built illegally with scrap material usually on abandoned/uninhabited land. These communities lack basic infrastructure and public services to promote and sustain healthy living such as water, drainage, and sanitation; additionally, the poor materials used in the construction of these shanty houses offer little security, placing residents at risk of injury, violence, and death. These risks are exacerbated by state and private responses to the proliferation of these communities, which has been to destroy them, usually by fire and other violent means, leaving residents no choice but to flee and relocate with their family and any remaining property. Since residents typically have multiple children, these experiences will likely have implications for their later development, as adolescents come to understand themselves and their place in the world based on their experiences as children.  Because these experiences go untold, proposed “solutions” to slum communities do not take into consideration these negative developmental outcomes. 

While the social, health, and economic aspects of slum living are often the subject of inquiry, less attention has been given to the psychological effects of slum conditions on the young, especially during sensitive periods of development. In the literature that does exist, young children have received more attention than adolescents. Not only do adolescents merit study in their own right, but a narrative approach to the study of adolescents can also shed light on childhood experiences, as they are better able to articulate their experiences as a child than young children themselves are able to do. This project focuses on how adolescents interpret the experience of forced removal from these slum communities and what these interpretations tell us about how society and the government should address slum communities. It is part of a larger study on the systematic analysis of adolescence and factors that influence different psychosocial developmental outcomes, demonstrating the need for social policies that have human development perspectives at the forefront. 

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