Inside one of the most crowded islands on Earth where more than 500 people live in space smaller than soccer pitch
Niamh Shackleton
Featured Image Credit: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images
When you think of overcrowded places, the likes of Paris, Rome and New York might come to mind - but this tiny island definitely takes the cake.
Located on Africa's Lake Victoria is a place called Migingo Island and when we say tiny, we mean tiny.
The body of land is less than 0.5 acres big. To put that into perspective, that's around the size of half of your average soccer field.
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Migingo Island awkwardly sits on the the border between Uganda and Kenya, meaning no one's quite sure who actually owns it.
With this in mind, it's said that a bilateral commission is going to examine the land to determine if it should be handed to Uganda or Kenya.
The move comes after both countries previously decided to create a joint commission to determine where the border is - but nothing came of it.
The island's been co-managed by Uganda and Kenya ever since.
The ongoing dispute over ownership of Migingo has been hailed as Africa's 'smallest war'.
As you can imagine, because the island is so small, everything on it is very close together.
Residents on the island live side-by-side in metal shacks. As well as homes, there's reportedly has four bars, a makeshift hair salon and several brothels, according to the Mirror.
While there might be four bars, there's allegedly only one sanitation facility available.
The main type of work available on the island is fishing, with species such as Nile Perch being plentiful the deep waters surrounding Migingo.
And it's the fishing that draws some people to the minuscule island.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2018, Migingo resident Isaac Buhinza said that he went to the island because 'my friends who were here before used to come back home with lots of goodies' from their fishing trips.
Living on the island rather than travelling there from nearby countries saves fishermen fuel and gives them access to wholesalers.
It's thought that fisherman can make a decent living on catching Nile perch, with the price of the fish going up 50 percent in recent years (as of 2019).
According to Kenyan fisherman Kennedy Ochieng, large good quality fish could bring in excess of $300 per kg in international markets, Al Jazeera reported.
While Nile perch is still in abundance around the island, other fish stocks have sharply diminished.