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When an engineer saw his neighborhood flooding again and again, he took matters into his own hands and organized his community to devise and implement a solution.
When it started raining that Thursday afternoon, Adeyemi Akinyemi thought little of it. “Just the usual Lagos rain — heavy, but normal,” he tells me. But by dusk, he knew this time was different.
Water had breached homes, rising above furniture, swallowing streets. “You could hear people yelling each other’s names across the water,” Adeyemi says. “Nobody really knew what to do.”
His own house, a few blocks uphill, stayed dry. But when he ran outside, the damage was clear. On a nearby road, gutters had burst open. Plastic bags and debris clogged the culvert.
“We weren’t prepared,” he says. “But I knew it wasn’t just the rain. It was what we didn’t do before it came.”
Across Africa, extreme weather is becoming more frequent and more violent. From crippling droughts in the Horn to deadly floods in the south, the continent is facing what scientists call “climate whiplash” — wild swings between intense dryness and punishing rains. In 2024, 18 countries across West and Central Africa saw entire communities uprooted, with more than 7.5 million people affected by floods.
“The spells of heavy summer rainfall” have become the “new normal” in Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute climate researcher Izidine Pinto told Reuters in 2024.
There’s something powerful about saying ‘We see the problem, and we’ll be the solution.'
– Moji Ilesanmi
In Nigeria, the toll is stark. The floods in 2024 and 2025 impacted more than 5 million people across 35 states. Homes were swept away; farms are now gone and families have been displaced. And in Lagos, Nigeria’s fast-growing coastal city, the risks multiply. Each rainy season, low-lying terrain, crumbling drainage systems, and an explosion of informal housing leave millions exposed.
But in some neighborhoods, people aren’t waiting for the government to save them. In streets where drains overflow and help doesn’t come, locals are stepping up — not with grand solutions, but with what they know.
“We’ve lived through these floods,” says Adeyemi, a Lagos-based engineer. “We know where the water collects, which culverts always clog. So why not start there?”
That’s what led him to create Ònà Mímọ́ — a grassroots climate-engineering project born not from grants or policy, but from lived experience. It began with a few maps, some neighbors, and the decision to stop treating floods as inevitable.
“We didn’t wait for someone to fix it,” Adeyemi says. “We just started with what we had — and it turns out, that was enough.”
The turning point came during the 2023 floods, when his block was submerged waist-deep and his elderly neighbor was trapped indoors for hours. “That was when I said, ‘This can’t keep happening. We know where the water comes from. Let’s do something.’”
But he didn’t start from scratch. Across Nigeria’s flood-prone regions — in places like Bayelsa and Akwa Ibom — locals had long been building their own embankments using sandbags, logs, and mud. Adeyemi had read about these community-led solutions.
“They weren’t engineers,” he says, “but they understood the terrain. They used what they had. That stuck with me.”
He drew inspiration from stories like that of Jonah Sodineye, a community leader in Agan-asa who rebuilt seawalls by hand after losing his home twice to the sea. “That was real engineering,” Adeyemi says. “Not the kind you learn in school — the kind born out of necessity.”
Inspired, he began sketching crude flood maps of his Lagos neighborhood — just lines on paper at first, showing blocked drains and places where the water pooled deepest. He and a few neighbors cleared culverts, dug channels, and hauled waste from gutters. They weren’t waiting for permission or policy.
“There was no template. We were figuring it out as we went,” Adeyemi tells me.
From the start, it wasn’t just about drainage. It was about agency.
We didn’t wait for someone to fix it. We just started with what we had — and it turns out, that was enough.
– Adeyemi Akinyemi
“There’s something powerful about saying, ‘We see the problem, and we’ll be the solution,’” says Moji Ilesanmi, a retired teacher and one of the first to join the Ònà Mímọ́ project. “We were tired of waiting. And Adeyemi gave us a reason to start.”
These days, Ònà Mímọ́ has spread beyond one street. Every weekend, neighbors show up — clearing drains, stacking sandbags, mapping where floodwater hits hardest.
“Before, rain meant fear,” says Fatimah Ojo, a mother of three who lives two blocks away. “Now, we can finally feel safe.”
The team now plans to expand into nearby communities. “We’ve seen what’s possible,” Adeyemi says. “Now we want to help others do the same.”
Awesome
So creative and simple