Billboard tenants: The invisible Lagosians who sleep, give birth, live in the open

In the restless megacity of Lagos, where skyscrapers rise and traffic never fully sleeps, more than 20,000 residents exist without a permanent roof. They are known, in local parlance, as “billboard tenants.” The name captures a stark reality: people who have no fixed address, no tenancy agreement, and no walls of their own. Instead, they claim temporary shelter under bridges, along highways, in bus terminals, beneath pedestrian walkways, and in the shadows of the city’s ubiquitous advertising structures. Here, under the glare of neon signs or the concrete underbellies of flyovers, they sleep, cook, raise children, and sometimes even give birth.
Lagos, Africa’s largest city by some estim...