What Okoritak Taught Me About Development That Lasts

There are visits that confirm what you already know, and others that sharpen it. My recent trip to Akwa Ibom State with the SPA II team did both. SPA II, the second phase of our Strategic Partnership Agreement programme, supports young people and communities in the Niger Delta to organise, claim their rights, and engage the institutions that hold power over their lives, from local government to state ministries to the companies operating on their land. Over several days, I moved between a solar-powered youth lab, a riverine community reachable only by boat, and the offices of commissioners and the Deputy Governor in Uyo. By the end, one word connected everything I had seen. Coordination.

I want to share what I saw, because it illustrates something I have come to believe about development in Nigeria. Our deepest problem is rarely an absence of effort or even of resources. It is a collective action problem. Many actors are working, often in the same places and on the same issues, but the sum of their efforts is less than it should be because no one holds the whole picture. Akwa Ibom offered me both the clearest evidence of that problem and the most encouraging signs of its solution.

My first stop was the Amgbeghe Youths; they told us Amgbeghe means “it concerns us”, and truly it concerns them. They carry their community at heart and tell the matters that concern them and the improvement of their community with so much passion and love for the community. It was a moment that took me back to the days of my youth, and I had a pleasant time with them, no doubt.

A youth lab that no longer needs us

I was at the Ibeno Green Youth Lab, established under SPA II. It is a beautiful, functional space with computers, solar power, internet through Starlink, a library and a co-working area. Young people across Eket and Ibeno use it to study, check their results, register for JAMB CBT and meet to discuss the civic and climate issues affecting their communities. It has become part of the ordinary rhythm of young people's lives, which is exactly what a facility like this should be.

But here is the detail I found most significant. Although ActionAid Nigeria set up the lab, Ibeno Local Government has been supportive and is taking charge of the centre for its sustainability. When I met the Vice Chairman of Ibeno LGA, we discussed the local government's own plans for the hub. That conversation mattered more to me than the building itself, because it captures a principle we hold firmly. The measure of a development intervention is not what it delivers but what it leaves behind. A project succeeds not when we open it, but when the system around it decides to keep it alive. Anything else is dependency wearing the costume of progress.

At the youth hub I also met the young people themselves. They open and close every meeting with an anthem of their own, also known by every community member. Beside their hub sits an agroecology farm that they manage. They spoke about their community's challenges with a clarity and organisation that would hold up in any boardroom. In our human rights-based approach we speak of rights holders rather than beneficiaries, and the distinction is not semantic. These young people are not waiting for programmes. They are organisers with a claim on their institutions, and our role is to widen the space in which they press it.

Crossing the water to Okoritak

Okoritak community in Ibeno LGA is accessible only by boat. The community head received us at his palace by the seaside and then led us across the water himself, walking the community with us on a transect walk so we could see daily life as it is.

What I saw at the community's main water source has stayed with me. It is contaminated with spirogyra, and Christmas tree in oil within the same water body that residents depend on for drinking and daily use. An alternative source exists, but it produces coloured water and requires an annual filter replacement costing about one million naira, which puts it beyond the community's reach. There is no toilet in the entire community. It is difficult to stand in a place like this, in one of the most resource-rich regions on the continent and not reflect on the distance between the wealth extracted from a place and the wellbeing of the people who live there.

I sat with young residents, including young women and a young person living with disability, who explained what all of this means in practical terms. The children told me about arriving at school well after the first and sometimes second lessons because of the long wait at the jetty for a boat to cross the river. Their demand was precise and reasonable. A school boat that helps them cross daily, just as free school buses serve children in town. It struck me that the children had already done the analytical work we often commission consultants to do. They had identified the barrier, named the solution, and pointed to the precedent.

Through SPA II, the young people of Okoritak have organised townhall meetings, engaged duty bearers directly, and pressed demands for a water tap and a host community development trust. ActionAid Nigeria installed a water treatment plant to respond to the immediate need, and its annual renewal is now due. We took that conversation, along with the school boat request, to the local government chairperson in Eket, Hon. Dens Glory Ekah Effiong, one of the many women leading in governance spaces under the Governor's Arise agenda, and she committed to acting in the immediate term while a lasting solution is put in place.

The question people asked Mark Angel

Standing in Okoritak, I remembered that our celebrity ambassador, Mark Angel, once visited this community to help amplify its water crisis. Some people online asked why he did not simply fix the water himself.

It is a fair question to sit with, because the honest answer explains how development actually works. No individual, no celebrity, no single NGO can fix water for every community that needs it, and a model that depends on heroic individuals is a model designed to fail at scale. What amplification can do is make a problem impossible to ignore. What advocacy can do is support communities to demand solutions from those with the mandate and resources to deliver them. And what institutions can do is build the frameworks through which government, companies and partners act together rather than in parallel. That is why a committee involving ActionAid Nigeria and CIF now exists, working with the Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning to support a development framework for the state, and why the Ministry has requested a comprehensive document on our work in Akwa Ibom. Amplification opens the door. Coordination walks through it.

Taking community voices to Uyo

The final leg of the visit took the concerns of these communities directly to the Akwa Ibom State Government. In one day, I met the Honourable Commissioners for Humanitarian Affairs, Budget and Economic Planning, Youth Development, and Mineral Resources and Environment, and we concluded with the Deputy Governor, Senator Dr. Akon Eyakenyi, who graciously received us at her home.

Every office listened attentively. The Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs agreed to push for a coordinating policy at the highest level. The Commissioner for Mineral Resources and Environment invited ActionAid Nigeria to support the development of the state's climate change policy, an invitation we accepted without hesitation. And in the Ministry of Youth Development, I saw the fruit of earlier advocacy. Through engagement by ActionAid Nigeria and CIF, the ministry was separated from sports development, giving young people a ministry dedicated wholly to them, with Dr. Ekerette P. Ekanem as its pioneer Commissioner. Institutional architecture shapes outcomes. When young people have a ministry of their own, their concerns move from the margins of another portfolio to the centre of one.

Something else struck me deeply throughout this visit. The inclusion of women in governance. The Executive Governor has quite a number of women working with him on his Arise agenda, from the Deputy Governor to commissioners and local government leadership, and it shows in how the state engages. The government's attention to young people and to rural communities was equally evident in every conversation we had. The evidence on this is settled. Institutions that reflect the people they serve tend to serve them better.

The thread that runs through everything

Here is the single issue I noted from every meeting, and from every community. Many actors are working in Akwa Ibom. Ministries are working. The NDDC is working. Oil companies are running their own interventions. Local governments are running theirs. Yet no one is coordinating it all, and communities like Okoritak fall through the gaps between well-intentioned efforts. This is the collective action problem in its purest form. Every actor is individually rational, and the collective outcome is still failure for the people at the end of the line.

This is not a criticism of any single actor. It is a description of a solvable problem. A coordinating framework that brings government, companies and development partners around the same table, with communities setting the agenda, would multiply the value of everything already being spent in the state. The commitments we received in Uyo suggest the appetite for it exists. What remains is the discipline to build it.

So, I leave Akwa Ibom encouraged. Encouraged by young people who organise themselves, by a local government that takes ownership of what we build together, and by a state government that listened and made commitments. The work ahead is to hold all of it together, and ActionAid Nigeria will be at that table.

If you represent a company, a foundation or an institution working in the Niger Delta and this resonates with you, I would welcome a conversation. The communities have already told us what they need. What remains is for us to answer together.