The challenge
Extreme heat is one of the most severe — and most ignored — climate risks facing African cities. In Lagos, more than 60% of the workforce is informal: market traders, transport operators, artisans, street vendors, waste pickers. They work outdoors or in poorly ventilated spaces, often without reliable electricity, cooling or water.
When the heat becomes dangerous, they stop working. Income disappears. Health costs rise. And unlike floods or drought, extreme heat sits almost entirely outside Nigeria’s insurance and social protection systems. There is no cover for it, because nobody has yet built a way to measure and price it.
What we are doing
We are developing the Heat-Risk Finance Module — a digital platform designed to make extreme heat visible, measurable and financeable for both communities and financial institutions. Rather than launching an insurance product, we are building the technical and institutional foundations that would allow insurers, microfinance institutions and social protection actors to engage with heat risk with confidence.
The first phase involves community heat-risk assessments in Makoko and Ajegunle, participatory design workshops where informal workers themselves shape what protection should look like, and calibration of heat thresholds using meteorological data.
Working with, not for
Informal workers, market associations and women’s groups are not consulted at the end of this process. They are shaping the product’s logic, affordability thresholds and trust requirements from the beginning. It is their expertise about how heat actually disrupts their work that makes this possible.