With 140 million people, Nigeria is the most populous African country - one in four Africans is a Nigerian. It is also Africa’s biggest oil exporter, yet half of its population lives below the poverty line, it receives only $6 of aid per capita a year and barely has any infrastructure to speak of. A committed team of reformers has set the country on the path of economic recovery since 2003. Whether new President Yar’Adua will be able to lock-in the achievements of the past few years and keep up the reform momentum will be crucial to give Nigeria a chance to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

For five generations the families of Nueva Alianza lived and worked on an estate owned by a landlord, who managed and remunerated their work in his coffee and macadamia plantations. By the end of the 1990s, the fall in the price of coffee exacerbated the debts collected by the landlord due to bad management of the estate. Not only was the land mortgaged, over time the landlord passed his debts over to the 40 families of the community: workers were not paid their salary for up to 18 months.