Along West Africa's Atlantic coast, a vital urban corridor struggles with systemic challenges

Lagos has long been an integral part of this urban corridor, shaped by historical trade and cultural ties. The cities along the Atlantic coast are linked by a coastal road that is being gradually developed into a $15 billion superhighway.

The project is led by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional bloc of 12 countries, and is intended to unlock the economic potential of the region.

The road itself compounds the problem. The Lagos-Badagry highway, which runs west from Lagos to the border with Benin, is under reconstruction. Deep potholes and a succession of checkpoints make the journey slow and costly.

Along the way, NPR passed through more than 30 checkpoints over a less-than-10-mile stretch of the road.

Immigration officials, police and soldiers man the checkpoints. Plainclothes men and boys carrying clubs wave down cars and search passengers.

Drivers say they are routinely forced to pay officers to be allowed to pass. One motorist, 40-year-old Peter Uche, says more than half of the 40,000 Nigerian naira ($28) he earns per trip is spent at checkpoints. Nigerian customs and immigration officials did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.

For many travelers, the road has become a defining image of Nigeria’s dysfunction and corruption.

After dozens of checkpoints, the road winds to an end at western Nigeria’s border with Benin.

Benin’s economy has benefited from its proximity to much larger countries. But in recent years, it has moved to become more self-reliant.

New trade zones prioritizing local manufacturing, as well as new hospitals, schools, museums and markets, are the result of a major investment drive under the recently departed government of former President Patrice Talon.

He oversaw what some economists describe as a modest transformation of the small West African country, which newly elected President Romuald Wadagni has vowed to continue.

While frustration with the government is rarely discussed openly, it bubbles below the surface of daily life.

Antoinette Hudou, 45, sells groceries on the upper floor of the market, at the Marché de Ganhi. “People are struggling,” she says. “I’ve been here since 7 a.m. — it’s 3 and no one has come,” she says. She also laments the higher cost of imported goods she sells, like pasta and tomato puree.

Like scores of ports along the coast, from Ghana’s Cape Coast to Badagry in Nigeria, the former port in Benin is today a site of pilgrimage and tourism. And it is now being reconstructed into a landmark national project, La Marina, to both preserve its legacy and leverage its growing commercial potential. But the project, to be completed this year, is not without controversy.

The resort is complete with tours of monuments to the slave trade — some preserved, some renovated or remade into new structures — along with a five-star hotel with pools, spas and waterside restaurants.

Lomé, a city of 2.5 million people, is rapidly expanding along the tiny strip of Togo’s 35-mile, palm-lined coast.

At the country’s independence in 1960, the population was just 80,000, but at a similar rate to cities like Lagos, it has rapidly multiplied.

For decades, Lomé has positioned itself as a portal to much of West Africa and as a key economic hub, in close proximity to larger connected economies like Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. Its enterprises, like its people, are intimately tied to the region.

Togo’s president, Faure Gnassingbé, has been in power since 2005, longer than a majority of the young country has been alive. “We’ve been ruled by just one family for a lifetime. People are exhausted,” says Pastor Edoh Komi, a former deputy mayor in Lomé and the president of the Martin Luther King Movement, a civil society group inspired by King’s nonviolent legacy.

In recent years, young people have organized pockets of protests, defying brutal clampdowns. “They’re seeing what is happening in other countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, which have elections, which have a form of democracy, and they want that too,” he says.

It propelled the women who dominated the market into new wealth. They became an example of how working-class enterprise could lead to genuine prosperity.

They were known by the luxury cars they bought, like Mercedes-Benz, and were memorialized in popular culture as glamorous, wealthy figures, riding their cars through the capital.

Bundles of colorful fabrics fill dozens of boutiques at the sprawling Grand Marché in Lomé — including the Dutch wax fabrics dense with swirling, floral designs, which are at the heart of the Nana Benz’s fairy-tale rise.

On the walls of dozens of textile boutiques, many of which are franchises of the Dutch company Vlisco, are pictures of the women who founded them. In one store, set up by Marguerite Sewoa-Lawson, the upper floor of her boutique becomes an archival exhibition, the walls lined with framed photographs telling a success story beloved across the region.

But to many, their achievements now feel out of reach. The Nana Benz inspired thousands of women to join the trade, which saturated the market.

Economic shocks in the region also affected the market, according to experts, including the devaluation of the regional currency in 1994 and the initially turbulent impact of reforms backed by the International Monetary Fund. The reforms promoted more liberal trade, with few protections for local industries.

According to widespread analysis of the reforms, they diminished the dominance of Dutch wax fabrics and led to the rise of cheaper Chinese imports that have further devalued the market.

“One of the particularities of this space is that urbanization has occurred without job creation,” says Alice Hertzog, a social anthropologist at the University of Zurich’s Ethnographic Museum, who has researched migration and urbanization in the Lagos-Abidjan region.

“For people to seek out a livelihood in this environment, quite often they seek out that livelihood by being on the move, by making the most of the different opportunities that emerge, by moving as those bust-and-boom cycles occur along the corridor,” she says.

“I’ve been coming to the market with my mother since I was a child,” Laye says. She comes from a family of traders — her mother from Togo, who married her father, a Ghanaian businessman. “They did very well, provided for all of us, sent us to school.” But the modest returns they enjoyed dwarf her daily income of less than $4 a day.

“This is my life,” she says, her arms outstretched as customers wade through the market stalls and scan groceries and mounds of clothes laid on mats along the street. “It’s not easy. Since 8 a.m., no money,” she says, laughing sadly.

A chronic lack of affordable homes has driven many of the city’s poorest residents into informal housing settlements, while several new luxury and affluent estates are being built across the city, increasingly charging in U.S. dollars rather than Ghana’s cedi currency to exploit a changing market.

A more affluent class of migrants — compared with the average income in Ghana — is increasingly visiting and settling in Ghana, arriving from Western countries like the U.S. and drawn by the glowing perception of Ghana as an African country on the rise.

But NPR’s team, comprising citizens of ECOWAS countries, was asked to pay between $4 and $10 at each border along the Lagos-Abidjan corridor. The most expensive was at the border with Ivory Coast.

Small-business owners tried to barter with officials who demanded bribes to let them ferry goods across the border.

But borders are just one obstruction. Temidire Alesh is the 33-year-old founder of a tourism company called Omi.

“There’s so much beauty and potential to life in West Africa, but at the same time, everyone knows the many basic challenges you have to navigate. Moving money from one country to another is a challenge, despite the fact that many of the same banks are operating in each country,” she says.

Mobile money operators have transformed banking in much of Africa. But regulations prevent companies from integrating their services across borders.

The same is true of telecommunications. Many of the same companies exist across borders, but SIM cards in one country aren’t usable in the next.

Bassam draws a steady trickle of tourists — enough to sustain a modest tourism economy that provides some of the few jobs for young people like Sagna.

“There are no jobs here. There’s almost nothing to do,” he says. “Most of the young people here leave.”

In every country between Nigeria and Ivory Coast — bar Ghana, where 67-year-old John Mahama’s election was widely considered credible — young people told NPR they were fed up with aging leaders with questionable legitimacy.

“You’ll find it hard to find young people who love how Ouattara is managing the country,” Sagna, the tour guide, says. “He’s done some good things, but he’s also overstayed. Our leaders never know when it’s time to go.”

“Actually, what you see is that the vast majority, more than 80 to 85% of those migrating in West Africa, are doing so regionally, to towns and cities within their countries and on the continent,” says Hertzog, the social anthropologist at the University of Zurich. “And that shows a very different side to how people in the region are pursuing opportunities.”