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Eight weeks of fieldwork across more than 300 Community Development Associations reveal a hidden system of community-led water governance sustaining Lagos where formal public provision has fallen short.

I thought I was going to document water infrastructure. Instead, I documented humanity and resilience.

Lagos State Commissioner for the Environment and Water Resources, Tokunbo Wahab

At 6:00 every morning in one Lagos community, a Community Development Association (CDA) chairman switches on his personal borehole. For three hours, neighbours queue with buckets and jerrycans. The electricity bill is his. The generator fuel is his. The repairs are his. The beneficiaries are hundreds of households.

He is not an employee of the Lagos Water Corporation. He is simply a resident who decided that no one around him should go without water.

Over the past eight weeks, I have visited and coordinated fieldwork across more than 300 CDAs in Lagos and neighbouring communities documenting how residents organise, finance and sustain water access. Observations and discussions with community executives and residents challenged almost everything we assume about urban service delivery.

What I found challenged everything I thought I knew about urban water governance.

The Lagos I encountered was not one where water simply flowed through government pipes. It was a Lagos where ordinary citizens had become engineers, utility managers, fundraisers, maintenance officers and emergency responders – not because they wanted to, but because they had no alternative.

Across the city, I saw communities surviving not because public water systems worked, but because neighbours refused to let neighbours go thirsty.

That is the story we rarely tell.

In community after community, the official map of water infrastructure did not match reality. The coordinates often led us to abandoned boreholes, vandalised facilities, dry taps or projects that had long ceased to function. Some had been commissioned with fanfare years earlier, only to become monuments to failed maintenance. Others had been abandoned because no one could afford electricity to pump the water they were built to provide. Yet the communities had adapted.

Where public systems failed, churches opened their compounds and allowed residents to fetch water. Mosques pumped water from old wells for worshippers and nearby households. Community chairmen connected extra taps outside their homes so neighbours could collect water every morning. Long-standing residents spent their own money repairing boreholes that served hundreds of people. Youth associations raised funds. Community members contributed diesel, petrol and labour. Women organised cleaning schedules around communal water points.

Water provision was no longer public. It had become personal.

One CDA Chairman told me he spends thousands of naira every time there is a prolonged electricity outage just to keep his borehole running for the community. Another explained that he reduced the quantity of water distributed because generator fuel had become too expensive. In another community, a family had provided free water to residents for over thirty years, passing the responsibility from one generation to another.

Elsewhere, a mosque continued to maintain a decades-old well because abandoning it would leave many households without a reliable source of water. None of these people receive government subventions. None are officially recognised as water providers. Yet without them, entire communities would struggle to meet one of humanity’s most basic needs.

Perhaps the most striking discovery from this journey was that Lagos does not only have a water crisis – it has an energy crisis disguised as a water crisis.

Again, and again, the same story emerged. The borehole works. The pump works. The water exists. But there is no electricity.

Transformer failures lasting months. Communities spending tens of thousands of naira on diesel every month. Generators donated years ago but now abandoned because fuel costs have become unbearable. Public water systems sitting idle – not because all are broken, but because no one can afford to power them. Water, in many communities, has become hostage to electricity and neglect.

Another reality became impossible to ignore. Too many public water projects are designed only for commissioning, not for sustainability. Across several Wards in Lagos, I encountered boreholes donated by politicians, government agencies, philanthropists, religious and non-governmental organizations and international partners. Many began with genuine intentions. Some now stand abandoned. Others have been vandalised. Some have been stripped of their pumping machines. Others cannot operate because maintenance funding disappeared after the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Why then do we celebrate the commissioning of boreholes but rarely ask who will pay for fuel, maintenance, electricity and repairs five years later?

One respondent said something that has stayed with me:

“The project was completed, but nobody planned for what happens after.”

That single sentence captures one of the greatest weaknesses in our approach to public infrastructure. We celebrate construction. We rarely plan for stewardship. Yet amid these challenges, there was hope.

I saw communities creating governance systems that many formal institutions would admire. Water committees. Youth forums. Street captains. Emergency contribution mechanisms. Crowdfunding for repairs. Rotational maintenance schedules. Shared accountability. Informal partnerships between neighbouring CDAs. Community-led rules that ensured fair access to scarce water resources.

Urban planners often speak about resilience. I saw resilience – not in policy documents or conference presentations, but in communities quietly solving problems every single day. The fieldwork revealed that Lagos’s water resilience depends not only on physical infrastructure, but also on social infrastructure: the trust, local leadership, community institutions and collective action that enable residents to organise, finance and sustain water access where formal systems fail. In many of the communities visited, it was these social systems – not government infrastructure alone – that determined whether households had water to drink, cook and meet their daily needs.

One uncomfortable truth also emerged from the field. Women and young girls bear much of the burden of household water collection, yet in many of the communities visited, they remain significantly underrepresented in CDA leadership and water-related decision-making. Building resilient urban water systems requires more than physical infrastructure – it requires governance that reflects those most affected by everyday water insecurity.

The Cruelest Irony is Living Beside the Lagos Water Corporation Without Water

Imagine walking past a government water facility every morning to buy water from your neighbour’s borehole. That is the reality for many Lagos communities.

During the survey, we engaged with residents living around facilities associated with the Lagos Water Corporation and former public water schemes who still relied on private boreholes, commercial vendors, churches, mosques, and generous neighbours for something as basic as drinking and household water.

Some pipelines had stopped functioning decades ago. Some public boreholes had become abandoned monuments to failed promises. Some federal and state projects had been commissioned with fanfare but never sustained. In several communities, people pointed to public water facilities – not as symbols of reliable service – but as reminders of what used to work, what never worked, and what government forgot. The irony is impossible to ignore.

How can communities live beside public water infrastructure yet remain dependent on private generosity and purchase for survival?

How can a state with institutions established to provide potable water leave communities to organise their own parallel water systems?

The answer lies not only in infrastructure, but in governance. There is a state-wide failure to sustain public systems long after the commissioning ceremonies ended. Infrastructure existed in many places; service delivery did not. As public provision weakened, communities stepped into the vacuum. The uncomfortable truth is that much of Lagos is being hydrated not because the public system works, but because ordinary citizens have refused to let their neighbours go thirsty.

That reality should concern every actor and policymaker!

The greatest lesson from this research is simple. Lagos does not lack communities willing to participate. It lacks policies and systems that recognize communities as genuine partners.

For decades, Community Development Associations have organised security, maintained roads, provides transformers and street lights, responded to flooding, mobilised residents and, increasingly, filled the vacuum left by inadequate public water provision. They possess local knowledge, trusted and sometimes isolated leadership structures and the social capital needed to sustain community infrastructure. Yet they remain largely invisible within formal urban water governance.

From retired civil servants opening their private boreholes every morning. CDA chairmen paying electricity bills from their own pockets and crowdfunding. Mosques and Churches installing taps for anyone who needed water. Youth associations repairing broken water systems. Women cleaning water points and organising contributions to fuel generators. Neighbours sharing water before asking for tokens. These are not isolated acts of kindness, but operating models of water governance across many Lagos communities. Together, these actors form an invisible water utility operating in parallel to the formal one.

This must change!!!

Government at state and local levels should not see CDAs as beneficiaries waiting for assistance. They should see them as co-producers of urban services. Future investments in water infrastructure should move beyond constructing new boreholes. They must include long-term maintenance plans, dedicated operational funding, affordable and reliable energy solutions, transparent community management structures, routine water quality monitoring, and institutional partnerships that strengthen – not replace – the capacity communities have already built.

A “megacity” like Lagos cannot continue outsourcing one of its most fundamental public services to goodwill, philanthropy, and community resilience. Community action should complement government systems – not replace them. If Lagos is serious about achieving widespread access to safe water, then it must begin by recognising the invisible providers who have quietly sustained entire neighbourhoods for decades. More importantly, it must ask why they had to. Because the question is no longer whether communities are resilient. The question is why they have been forced to become the water utility of last resort.

As I left one community after another, administering surveys, recording spatial data, and making observations, I realised the most important infrastructure I had documented was not a borehole, a reservoir or a water tank.

It was trust.

Trust that when the chairman opens his gate, water will flow.

Trust that neighbours will contribute when a pump breaks down.

Trust that someone, somewhere in the community, will step will step forward before taps run dry.

These invisible water providers have kept Lagos running for decades. The question is no longer whether communities can govern water. The question is whether our policies are finally ready to recognise the people who already do. The future of urban water resilience in Lagos may not begin with another borehole. It may begin by recognising the communities that have quietly been acting as the city’s water utility all along.

By Favour John, Field Team Manager and Field Enumerator, Study on Urban Water Resilience in Lagos: Community Development Associations (CDAs), Water Governance and Resilience Survey (June-August. 2026), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); johnolusola36@gmail.com; +2347017255923