In Nigeria’s Ibeju-Lekki area, dispossession driven by the Chinese-funded Lekki Free Zone (LFZ) and the larger Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ) produces gendered outcomes. Drawing on interviews, this essay identifies three compounding losses for local women. First, the loss of subsistence farming threatens food security. Second, the loss of traditional fishing roles pushes women into petty trading or casual labour with significantly lower earnings. Third, the zones preferentially hire migrant men, while indirect service jobs are accessible largely only to local men, excluding local women from employment opportunities. Women retain their domestic caregiving burdens despite shrinking opportunities for income and subsistence.
As the Nigerian Government developed the southwestern city of Lekki in the 2000s, the entry of Chinese investment was expected to boost manufacturing and create employment, with some observers projecting 170,000 new jobs (Eletuo 2022). Almost two decades later, however, only 5,000 new jobs have been realised and local communities remain impoverished, with women bearing particularly adverse impacts (Goodburn et al. 2024). Rather than driving radical change, the Chinese-funded Lekki Free Zone (LFZ) has sharpened existing inequalities and reinforced Nigerian gender norms, providing another example of how Chinese investments in Africa operate not in a vacuum but in a field of complex existing inequalities (Huang 2024). Gender is a crucial lens through which to see these multilayered tensions because women often bear the brunt of the negative outcomes.
Research on such Chinese-funded zones has tended to focus on economic factors, with much less attention given to how their impacts vary across genders. More recently, the literature has begun to examine the gendered dimension, including how women, predominantly internal migrants, find employment in such zones (Fanuel et al. 2022; Goodburn 2026) and the intimate relationships that develop between Chinese men and African women (Haruyama 2024; Driessen 2019). Building on these studies, this essay focuses on women from the affected communities, whose land, livelihoods, and social status are significantly affected by Chinese investment. The essay argues that the structural transformation caused by these investments produces a gendered outcome, whereby local women experience three compounding losses. First, they lose access to subsistence farming by being dispossessed of their farmland; second, they lose their traditional fishing roles; and third, they are excluded from new economic opportunities as the industrial zone employs mainly men. Together, these result in a broader erosion of women’s economic autonomy and household status. Rather than being incidental to the industrialisation process, these exclusions are structurally produced and reproduced by the operational norms of the LFZ and its enclave-style model of industrialisation.
Ossome and Naidu (2021) argue that stylised accounts of structural transformation are gender-blind, as they render invisible women’s social reproductive labour that subsidises industrial wages across subsistence production, petty commodity production, and casual work. Using their framework, I examine the types of farm and non-farm activities in which women engage as they navigate structural transformation in Lekki. In this case, local women not only lose their traditional farm work, including subsistence agriculture and fishing, but also are excluded from non-farm industrial jobs. The pressure to earn income remains with women even as their resources shrink. As a result, they lose the relative autonomy they had acquired through their role in fish value chains and are forced to resort to petty trading and casual labour with lower earnings, becoming increasingly dependent on their husbands.
This essay draws on fieldwork carried out in and around the Lekki Free Zone across two visits, in February and May 2024. Interviews were conducted with a range of local stakeholders, in a mix of English and Yoruba with the assistance of a translator. Twenty women were interviewed, including 15 members of a local informal association of women fish traders, hereinafter referred to as the market women’s association. Interviewees came primarily from four villages—Magbon Sebun, Oke Segun, Idotin, and Itoke—and from both Muslim and Christian communities. A Lagos-based nongovernmental organisation (NGO) advocating for the rights of local communities facilitated access to the respondents.
As a woman and an outsider, my access to local women in Lekki was highly restricted. Conducting in-person interviews in the villages proved nearly impossible, owing to strict traditional norms that prevent villagers from speaking to outsiders without the permission of the local village chief or Baale. Here, the NGO’s longstanding advocacy work with the market women’s association helped establish trust and, following its advice, I was able to conduct online interviews. Being a woman researcher helped me build rapport with the respondents, who were more willing to share their experiences with me than they might have been with a male researcher. The women also felt they could speak more freely to someone from outside their immediate community. However, an elderly local man was present at the start of an online focus group discussion before eventually leaving, which may have constrained what the women were willing to say. The online interviews were deliberately not recorded to protect the anonymity of the research participants.
Industrial Transformation in Lekki
The LFZ is one of China’s five overseas economic and trade cooperation zones that receive direct support from the Chinese State. Although formalised at the 2006 Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, the initiative to build such a zone came in 2004 from then governor of Lagos State, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, now the President of Nigeria. In the 2000s, the Nigerian Government saw such industrial zones as policy instruments to create large-scale employment, particularly for women, and to lift people out of poverty (Farole 2011). Bringing in Chinese investment through the LFZ was similarly expected to help Nigeria learn lessons from China’s industrial success (Lawanson and Agunbiade 2018; Tagliarino et al. 2018).
The LFZ occupies the southwest quadrant of the Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ), a broader initiative by the Nigerian Government to transform Lekki. The southeast quadrant hosts an oil refinery owned by the Nigerian Dangote Group; the Lagos Free Zone, operated by the Singaporean Tolaram Group; and the Lekki Deep Sea Port. The northwest and northeast quadrants of the LFTZ remain undeveloped.
The Lagos State Government acquired the land for the broader LFTZ in the 1990s by invoking Nigeria’s Land Use Act of 1978, which vests control of all land in the governor of the state (in this case, Lagos). While Lekki is geographically part of the Lagos Island Axis, it falls administratively under the Eti-Osa Local Government Area. Of the 16,500 hectares of agricultural land acquired from 39 communities across 26 villages, 3,000 hectares were allocated to the Chinese-funded LFZ. Changes in the region, such as environmental damage to the coast and heavy securitisation of fishing waters, are attributable to the entire industrial complex of the LFTZ and are not limited to the LFZ.
Local women had vehemently rejected the LFZ, stressing that they had no expectation of benefiting from it. In a focus group discussion, participants explained that they were determined to not lose their land, having learned from earlier experiences in the Niger Delta, where local communities lost access to and control over their resources. One woman said: ‘The government took our land without our knowledge, without engaging with us, and without any dialogue.’ An elderly woman spoke with agitation about losing access to her family’s agrarian land:
I cannot go to my family’s farmlands anymore; my children cannot go there either. There is a big fence now, I do not know who has erected it … We are cut off from accessing our own family farmlands.
The dispossession affected women intergenerationally. One woman in her twenties, whose family’s farm and residential land were acquired for the zone, after which her family was resettled in a different village, described it as ‘living like an orphan on my father’s land’. She felt the loss of inheritance and her family had lost the land that formed the basis of their livelihood.
Representatives of the Lagos chapter of Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa, a Nigerian NGO, similarly argued that although the government acquired the land, it was ultimately handed over to corporations. As a result, locals could not hold the corporations accountable, while also feeling that the government had failed to protect their interests.
Despite having only limited formal influence in land negotiations, local women did not passively accept dispossession. Members of the market women’s association actively protested the sale of their village lands and resistance from local villagers continues to this day. A major incident occurred in 2015, when protests escalated into the fatal shooting of the LFZ manager. ‘It was like a war,’ one woman recalled of the confrontations between local women and state authorities. During one interview, another woman in her forties stood up to reveal a deep gash on her left leg, caused by a gunshot wound sustained during the agitations against the LFZ. She had risked her safety to fight for the cause, was hospitalised for a year, lost her income during that period, and received no compensation.
Women’s Traditional Livelihoods
Most communities in the Ibeju-Lekki area depended on fishing for their livelihoods, supported by the sea to the south and the Lekki Lagoon to the north of the LFZ. The area was rich in aquatic life, making Lekki a significant source of seafood for the city of Lagos. The traditional division of labour within the fishing economy was gendered: men went out on the water to catch fish, while women smoked the catch and sold it in the markets (Lawanson and Agunbiade 2018; Ojebiyi et al. 2023). While fishing was often operated as a family business, it also functioned as a collective enterprise. Women worked together to dry and sell fish in the market and, through these activities, informally organised themselves into a market women’s association, which gave them a collective voice in bargaining. Besides fishing, women engaged in subsistence agriculture, cultivating crops such as peppers, cassava, palm oil, and coconuts on their family’s farmland.
The changes to the coastline caused by the broader LFTZ added to these losses. Deep-sea dredging for the Lekki Port, constructed by the state-owned China Harbour Engineering Company, had altered the coastline and its ecology. The women said they had not been adequately informed about the environmental impacts of the dredging. There was strong agreement among them that they had not consented to the construction activities, which had caused an increase in coastal flooding that destroyed the coconut harvest and aquatic life, directly affecting their livelihoods. Women in their forties and above recalled that before the LFTZ they could get a bountiful catch along the shore. Now the men had to spend entire days and nights at sea, relying on expensive fuel-powered boats to find sufficient catch. Besides these ecological changes, heavy securitisation of the coast had led to a total prohibition on fishing activities (The Guardian 2024). While the decline in fishing was driven primarily by the port’s deep-sea dredging and coastline securitisation—both elements of the broader Lekki Port—the LFZ itself physically cut these women off from their farmland through land acquisition and the erection of barriers. Across the larger LFTZ, which includes multiple industrial projects beyond the LFZ, such exclusion of local communities is widespread.
With traditional agrarian livelihoods in decline and no alternative in the emerging industries, the women were confronted with losses on multiple fronts: their status as economic agents in the fish value chains, their social standing and bargaining power within the family, and their financial independence.
Exclusion from New Employment
The women complained of a lack of transparency about what happened in the zone; besides being physically excluded from it, they had no knowledge of how things worked: ‘We do not even know what is happening in the Lekki Free Zone!’ ‘There are giant walls and we do not know what goes on inside!’
Despite expectations that it would create jobs for the local community, the LFZ followed the practice of other firms in the LFTZ of hiring migrants over locals. Owing to continuing hostility with locals over unresolved land compensation, the factories preferred to keep locals outside the securitised walls. At the same time, the migration of labour from poorer and conflict-affected regions of northern Nigeria created a useful supply of cheap labour. One respondent speculated that Aliko Dangote, the owner of the oil refinery in the southeast quadrant of the LFTZ and a Hausa businessman from Nigeria’s Kano State, was able to mobilise ethnic networks to bring Hausa migrants to the LFTZ. As with most labour-intensive manufacturing jobs in the LFZ, the Lekki Port, and the LFTZ, male migrants were preferred. Broadly, two types of jobs were available in the LFZ. The first were comparatively secure white-collar positions requiring technical or managerial knowhow; these employees were given good accommodation inside the LFZ and were predominantly foreign nationals (Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, etcetera). As one woman said, ‘The real workers are not Nigerians, but foreigners.’ The second type were short-term contractual roles (usually three months) requiring heavy manual labour, and it was for these that internal migrants were hired. Locals were excluded from both.
While both local men and local women were left out of the industrial jobs, men found some alternative opportunities in the service sector, such as driving transport vehicles for the industries inside the zone. Local men could also invoke their status as omo-onile (or ‘sons of the soil’) to exact informal taxes from any non-local passing through their land, including foreigners and even Nigerians from outside Lekki. Traditionally, such rights to collect tax are available only to men, who are seen as the direct inheritors of their ancestral land.
Local women were cut off entirely from the economic benefits of the zone. Of the 15 women interviewed from the market women’s association, none had been able to find work in the LFZ. ‘We have no money to show,’ one of them said of their dire financial situation. Many had tried applying for jobs through an online portal, run by the Lekki Free Zone Development Company (LFZDC 2026), but never heard back. Having no direct contact with either a labour contractor or an employer, they felt alienated from the entire process. On rare occasions, women were hired by individual firms in the LFTZ to sweep or clean for one or two days a month on a casual basis. The women did not consider this a livelihood in any meaningful sense. Other studies have similarly reported that a small number of local women were sometimes employed for sewing jobs in garment factories inside the LFZ, as such jobs were deemed ‘appropriate’ for women according to both Nigeria’s patriarchal context and Chinese employers (Adunbi 2022).
Women’s Economic and Social Marginalisation
The exclusionary hiring practices of the LFZ, coupled with the destructive impacts of the LFTZ and the Lekki Port on traditional livelihoods such as farming and fishing, mean that opportunities for local women are shrinking. In interviews, women spoke about how the changes associated with the broader zone affected them collectively, damaging the social infrastructure of their shared labour. The collective activities that women once carried out in the fishing business had given them a sense of solidarity. Several women said that when they controlled the flow of money, they could save sufficient for themselves. Some were even able to save enough to set up shops on the coast and make larger profits. One such woman in her forties lost her fishing shop 10 years ago to coastal flooding caused by deep-sea dredging. Once an independent businesswoman, she is now forced into petty trading, as she cannot afford to build another shop. This has led to a significant decrease in her income. In the past, she could easily secure a bucket full of fish, sell it for 15,000 NGN (10.30 USD), and make a profit of 10,000 NGN (6.86 USD) every day. Now she barely makes 5,000 NGN (3.45 USD) per week. Pointing to the bucket she carried with her, which once would have been filled with fish every day, she said it was now full of bottles of mineral water that she would have to sell to get through the day.
The loss went beyond money. Women previously took pride in their role in the fish value chain. As recently as a decade ago, Lekki supplied mainland Lagos with most of its aquatic products; now there are almost no fish available to sell. Petty trading carries additional costs, as women must pay for transport to nearby towns to buy goods such as snacks and mineral water before returning to sell them in or around Lekki at slightly higher prices. The women are thus pushed further down the value chain.
In coastal Nigerian fishing communities, women are mainly responsible for securing food for the household (Anyim et al. 2021) and their loss of traditional livelihoods in Lekki adds a further burden of finding not only new work but also alternative sources of food for their children. Women with young children perceived a drastic change in the community’s diet over the past two decades; they could no longer offer the same nutritious food to which they had previously had access. Little local fresh produce was available once the farmland was changed into industrial land. It could take up to three days to bring produce from nearby towns such as Epe and Ijebu, significantly increasing the cost of food in recent years. Until 10 years ago, women could afford fish in their diet every day; now they can barely afford it once a month for their children. A young mother of two said her children would ‘cry, cry, cry’ for fish, while she was forced to give them cheap instant noodles from the ‘Indomie’ brand produced in the LFTZ. Moreover, the Lekki Lagoon had been damaged environmentally by waste and pollutants. Scientific analysis of lagoons in western Nigeria has found heavy-metal contamination exceeding safe limits near industrial and land-reclamation sites, posing direct health risks to coastal communities (Jolaosho et al. 2024). These women have witnessed a decline in their families’ health owing to the poisoning of aquatic life, which prevented them from accessing safe and edible fish.
As women lost their positions within the fish value chains, and thus their access to the flow of money, they frequently found themselves struggling within their households. An activist working with women in the local communities said that the increasing economic hardships resulting from the dispossession and exclusion from the LFZ often led to fights within families. Women are expected to contribute to household income differently to men: while men usually keep their income to themselves, often spending it on alcohol, women are expected to support the entire family. As women become more reliant on their husbands for money, this has led to clashes and an increase in domestic violence. With fewer resources and lower income than before, women must still provide for everyday household needs that have become more expensive. Even those who had their own market association are now struggling to survive. ‘The women experienced a loss of their identity, their self, and their livelihood,’ said one of the NGO leaders working with women from the local communities. In addition, women taking on roles outside traditional norms are viewed with suspicion, with some men accusing women of being ‘lazy and therefore [taking] up prostitution’ to make easy money. Yet, on any given day in and around Lekki, women could be seen tending fruit stalls, running small businesses, and carrying heavy loads on their heads. This contrasted with the many local men seen sitting together, huddled in groups, idling their time away. Despite compounding pressures, women had to continue finding casual work and petty trading to provide for their children.
Global China’s Gendered Impacts
Global China does not create these gendered outcomes on its own. Rather, it reinforces and, in some cases, amplifies existing inequalities such as local patriarchal norms. In so doing, it shapes their specific form in three ways, in the case of the LFZ.
First, Chinese firms’ preference for cheap rural land directly impacts local women’s traditional livelihoods and autonomy without creating alternative sources of income. Firms investing abroad frequently establish zones in rural areas where land is significantly cheaper, offsetting the additional investment required to build infrastructure. The rural setting means that women’s existing livelihoods, such as fishing and farming, are directly threatened by the construction of the zone. While men are also affected, they are less restricted than women in finding alternative opportunities. Daley and Pallas (2014) show that the commercialisation of rural land in Africa tends to affect women more negatively than men. While the displacement of rural communities is not distinctly Chinese, the distinction lies in the specific ways in which Chinese-led industrial projects are built: they typically employ Chinese construction companies to develop customised infrastructure from scratch on their expected timeline and engage directly with the host country to secure a stable supply of electricity and water.
Second, Chinese stakeholders entered the region only after the land had been acquired by the Nigerian Government, to avoid direct confrontation with local communities while still benefiting from the dispossession. Women were first excluded from land negotiations with the state and then excluded again from employment in the new economy. These processes have created multilayered tensions between the women in the local communities, local officials, and the Chinese investors who arrived later, while compounding women’s marginalisation, as they were displaced from their livelihoods with no comparable alternative sources of income.
Third, the zones function as enclaves, with infrastructure and benefits concentrated inside a heavily securitised LFZ, the broader LFTZ, and the Lekki Port, while losses such as food insecurity and ecological damage are borne by local communities. Women bear additional costs, since they carry primary caregiving responsibilities for their families even as resources become scarcer and more expensive. While Chinese investment did not create the enclave structure, it reinforced it, deepening the isolation of local women from the economic activities around them.
Importantly, the gendered outcome of the LFZ unfolds within the context of broader industrial projects in the region, driven by Nigerian state priorities but bolstered by Chinese economic participation. Women in Lekki were not passive recipients of these losses, however; they resisted their dispossession and continue to work in adverse conditions with shrinking incomes to provide for their families.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Robert Wyrod, Mingwei Huang, Hong Zhang, and the editors for their constructive feedback and meticulous engagement with the essay, which greatly helped to strengthen its arguments. I would like to thank Marie Berry for her thoughtful engagement with my paper and all the other participants at the ‘A Feminist Lens on Global China’ Colloquium at the University of Colorado Boulder in March 2025 for helpful discussions. I am extremely grateful to Charlotte Goodburn for her insightful advice and engaging discussions on the field and afterwards that helped shape this essay. I would also like to greatly thank Ogunlade Olamide Martins for excellent research assistance and facilitating interviews with the local women in the Ibeju-Lekki area. I also extend my thanks to Bolaji Omitola and Mercy Agumadu at Hillside University of Science and Technology, and Olumide Omodunbi at the Osun State University, Nigeria for their support in organising the fieldwork. Above all, I remain grateful to the women who generously made time to speak with me and share their experiences.
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Soumya Mishra researches the link between China-associated capital in Indian phone manufacturing and interstate labour migration. Her wider interests include rural-urban migration and industrial development in the Global South, especially China-associated manufacturing in India and Africa.
This article first appeared in Global China Pulse.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
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