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Lagos Schools Lag Behind as Internet Access Gap Widens Globally
A decade of underfunded promises, naira collapse and patchy power supply explain why Lagos pupils still lag Nairobi, Jakarta and São Paulo in classroom internet access.
How we reported this
Fewer than 18 percent of public secondary schools in Lagos State had reliable broadband connectivity as of the last audit conducted by the Lagos State Ministry of Education in late 2024, a figure that puts Nigeria's commercial capital well behind Nairobi's 41 percent, Jakarta's 54 percent and São Paulo's 67 percent, according to figures compiled by the Global Education Coalition. The gap did not appear overnight. It is the product of at least three separate policy failures, one currency catastrophe and a power grid that still cannot guarantee six hours of uninterrupted electricity to most of the city's 775-plus public secondary schools.
The timing matters because pressure is mounting. The federal government's National Digital Economy Policy, launched in 2020 and extended through 2025, set a target of connecting every public school to broadband by December of that year. That deadline passed quietly. Meanwhile, the naira's collapse from roughly 460 to the dollar in mid-2023 to well above 1,500 by early 2025, a direct consequence of President Bola Tinubu's fuel subsidy removal in May 2023, sent the cost of routers, laptops and fibre-laying contracts soaring in local-currency terms. Vendors who signed contracts in naira and imported equipment in dollars absorbed losses or simply walked away.
The Patchy Record Inside Lagos Classrooms
Visit Surulere's Birrel Avenue or the government schools clustered around Agege Motor Road in Agege Local Government Area and the picture is consistent: computer labs exist on paper, but machines are locked behind doors because there is no internet to connect them to, no diesel budget to run the generator that would power them, or both. The Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board, known as LASUBEB, disbursed ₦4.2 billion in 2023 for a school infrastructure upgrade programme that was supposed to include ICT labs across 200 primary schools. Contractors delivered hardware to roughly 130 of them. Independent assessments by the Paradigm Initiative, a Lagos-based digital rights organisation, found fewer than 60 of those labs were functional by the end of 2024.
Contrast that record with Nairobi, where the Kenyan government's Laptop Project, rebranded the Digital Literacy Programme, started awkwardly in 2013 but had, by 2022, placed working devices in the hands of students in more than 22,000 primary schools nationally, backed by a dedicated annual budget line that survived successive administrations. Jakarta rolled a city-funded fibre backbone into public schools starting in 2019 under its Smart City Office, prioritising outer-ring districts first. São Paulo's state government signed a public-private agreement with Claro Brasil in 2021 to provide subsidised connectivity to 5,000 state schools, with the bill partially offset by spectrum concession fees. Each of those cities had something Lagos has consistently lacked: a ringfenced connectivity budget that outlasted a single electoral cycle.
Where the Money Went and What Comes Next
The Dangote refinery's ramp-up in Lekki since 2024 has begun softening fuel import costs, and there is cautious optimism that local diesel prices, which hit ₦1,400 per litre at the pump in parts of Ikorodu in January 2025, may ease enough to make generator-powered school labs marginally viable again. The Eko Atlantic fibre corridor, initially laid to serve the commercial district off Victoria Island, has been cited by planners at the Lagos State Ministry of Science and Technology as a potential backbone for an expanded school connectivity push on Lagos Island and into Apapa.
None of that helps a student in Mushin or Bariga right now. Civil society groups, including the Paradigm Initiative and the Youth and Technology Foundation based on Bode Thomas Street in Surulere, are pressing Lagos House in Alausa, Ikeja, to adopt a standalone digital education budget, separate from the general education capital vote, before the 2027 state budget cycle opens. Without that structural fix, the next audit will almost certainly show the same disparity. The cities that closed the digital divide did not do it with one-off hardware donations. They did it by making connectivity a recurrent line item, year after year, regardless of who was in office.