Jos

Jos sits high on the Plateau, cooler than most of Nigeria, a city built on old tin-mining wealth with a mix of Christian and Muslim communities living side by side, though the city still carries scars from communal violence that flared repeatedly through the 2000s and 2010s. Money is tight here for most people — Nigeria's National Bureau of Statistics has put Plateau State's poverty rate above 60% in recent multidimensional poverty surveys, meaning most households you'll meet are stretching very little very far. There's no official street-count for homelessness in Jos the way some cities do it, but the International Organization for Migration's displacement tracking has recorded well over 200,000 internally displaced people across Plateau State in past years, many of them cycling through Jos looking for shelter, work, or family to stay with. If you're trying to find help, the Catholic Diocese of Jos and its Caritas outreach have a long history of feeding and sheltering people in crisis, COCIN (Church of Christ in Nations), headquartered right here in Jos, runs relief and welfare programs open to non-members, and the Nigerian Red Cross Society's Plateau State branch responds to displacement and emergency needs. None of this is a full safety net — it's patched together, like it is in most places — but real people staffing these places do try to help. Wherever you're sleeping tonight, you deserve to still be here in the morning, and that matters more than anything else on this page.