Walking

We support research, design guidance and pilots that give people on foot in Nigerian cities continuous, level footpaths and safe places to cross.

About this area

Every journey in a Nigerian city begins or ends on foot: to a bus stop, a market, a school or an office. Yet pavements tend to be delivered as part of road projects rather than designed as routes in their own right. Width, surface and kerb height vary between streets, footpaths often sit on slabs over open drains, and formal crossings are limited, so the experience of walking changes from one block to the next.

Lagos's non-motorised transport policy, drafted in 2018, calls for about 900km of footpaths. The documented walkway pilot, built by LAMATA with the TUMI programme, covers about 500 metres. What is missing is a shared standard for what a footpath should provide, a clear owner for each stretch of it, and a record of what road budgets deliver for people on foot.

Our grants in this area address that gap in five strands:

• Footpath standards, setting out clear widths, surfaces and kerb heights suited to Nigerian streets, including where street trading takes place.
• Crossings, studying how people cross multi-lane roads and what crossing types they will use.
• Corridor audits, recording footpaths and crossings every 100 metres on corridors where the state is already spending.
• Budgets and ownership, tracking what public budgets name and spend on walking, and who owns each footpath.
• Upkeep, testing maintenance partnerships with businesses and residents' associations.

Interested in supporting this area? Contact us.

Research agenda

Open questions in this area. Students, researchers and entrepreneurs may take up a question or propose their own within it.