By Esther Olubukola Adedeji For many decades, manual sand mining has been a traditional occupation of the Rabaka community in Lagos state, Nigeria. Skilled male divers fill buckets of sand from the bottom of the lagoon and load them onto canoes. Women generally stockpile this sand for sale to truck drivers, earning about a thousand naira per day (less than US$2), unless they own a canoe, which allows them to employ divers and stockpilers of their own. This traditional method of sand mining sustained livelihoods for decades by balancing sand harvesting...