Equity in Education: Navigating Socioeconomic Labyrinths for Pre-K-6 Access in Lagos, Nigeria - A Phenomenological Action Research

Date of Award

5-9-2026

Degree Name

Ed.D. in Leadership for Organizations

Department

Department of Educational Administration

Advisor/Chair

Pamela Young

Abstract

This Dissertation in Practice examines inequitable access to PreK–6 education in Lagos, Nigeria through qualitative phenomenological action research centered in the Makoko–Yaba informal waterfront community. Despite Lagos’ rapid urbanization and economic growth, children in structurally marginalized settlements experience persistent disruption in foundational schooling shaped by socioeconomic stratification, spatial precarity, and policy–practice disjunction. While prior scholarship has largely documented disparity through quantitative socioeconomic correlations, this study addresses a qualitative gap by centering the lived experiences of adults navigating educational access within a defined urban informal settlement context. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten community adults, adapted Photovoice with the same participants, an eight-person multi-stakeholder focus group, one interview with a community leader, and analysis of policy, academic, NGO, and media documents. Analysis followed Moustakas’s (1994) phenomenological procedures, including epoché (bracketing), horizontalization, meaning unit development, thematic clustering, and textural–structural synthesis. Credibility was strengthened through cross-source triangulation, member checking, reflexive audit trails, and thick contextual description. Findings indicate that educational exclusion in Makoko–Yaba is structurally produced rather than aspiration-deficient. Participants consistently articulated strong educational valuation while describing interlocking conditions that destabilize continuity: environmental hazards and unsafe learning spaces; chronic hunger and health instability; episodic attendance linked to economic volatility; instructional misalignment with interrupted schooling trajectories; stigmatized re-entry processes; digital exclusion; fragmented institutional coordination; and protective silence shaped by displacement fears. Educational access thus emerges not as a question of enrollment alone, but as the sustained capacity to participate in dignified, stable learning environments. These phenomenological insights informed the Smart Green Educational Initiative (SGEI), a practice-grounded intervention framework organized into seven integrated clusters: climate-responsive safe learning environments; embedded health and wellbeing supports; nutrition stabilization; equity-centered pedagogy and teacher capacity development; flexible continuity and re-entry pathways; AI-enabled digital access; and governance systems with embedded monitoring, evaluation, and sustainability architecture. Rather than positioning access as isolated infrastructure expansion, SGEI operationalizes continuity as a coordinated systems response to structural instability. This study contributes to educational leadership scholarship by demonstrating how site-specific phenomenological inquiry in precarious urban geographies can be translated into coherent systems design without collapsing complexity. It advances a context-anchored framework that reframes educational inequity as structurally generated yet operationally addressable through integrated, evidence-informed intervention architecture with conceptual transferability to similar urban informal settlement contexts.

Keywords

Education, Education Policy, Educational Leadership

Comments

OCLC No. 1591626823

Rights Statement

Copyright 2026, author.

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