No fewer than 279 persons were abducted across Nigeria in May 2026, while 842 others lost their lives in 156 violent incidents recorded within the same period, according to a new report.
The figures were disclosed in data released by Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database and made available to journalists on Sunday.
According to the report, the country witnessed a significant rise in insecurity compared to May 2025, with violent incidents increasing by 51.5 percent, fatalities rising by 90.1 percent, and kidnapping cases growing by 19.7 percent.
The development comes amid growing concerns over the effectiveness of ongoing peacebuilding efforts despite substantial investments by governments and development partners.
In a policy article titled “The Travails of Measuring Peacebuilding in Fragile Contexts,” development practitioner and research professional at Nextier, Jamilu Musa, and Dr Chukwuma Okoli, Visiting Lead for Research and Policy at Nextier and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, argued that weak impact assessment mechanisms are limiting the effectiveness of peacebuilding interventions.
The experts noted that although governments and communities continue to invest in dialogue sessions, awareness campaigns and other peacebuilding programmes, determining whether such interventions are actually reducing violence remains a major challenge.
They stressed that the success of peacebuilding initiatives should be measured by their ability to reduce conflict, strengthen resilience, improve trust among communities and promote social cohesion.
Musa and Okoli further observed that shrinking international funding has increased the need for effective monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding programmes.
They attributed the funding challenges to competing global crises, including the prolonged Russia-Ukraine war and tensions in the Middle East, which have shifted donor priorities.
The experts also linked declining support for peacebuilding initiatives in countries such as Nigeria to changing global economic policies and rising protectionist measures.
According to them, evaluating peacebuilding programmes is often difficult because key indicators such as trust, resilience, perceptions of safety and social cohesion are largely intangible and not easily quantified.
They identified four critical indicators for assessing peacebuilding outcomes: conflict dynamics, social cohesion, governance and inclusion, as well as resilience and conflict prevention.
The report explained that conflict dynamics help monitor trends in violence, including kidnappings and communal clashes, while social cohesion measures the level of trust and cooperation within communities.
It added that governance and inclusion assess public confidence in institutions and the participation of women, youths and vulnerable groups in decision-making processes, while resilience focuses on the ability of communities to prevent conflicts from escalating.
The experts, however, identified several obstacles to effective peace measurement, including attribution bias, short donor funding cycles, rapidly changing conflict situations, poor baseline data, difficulties in measuring intangible outcomes and security challenges affecting data collection in conflict-affected areas.
“Peace is not static; it is a work in progress involving both reducing conflict and increasing development,” they stated.
To improve impact assessment, the experts recommended the adoption of modern evaluation approaches such as outcome harvesting, conflict-sensitive monitoring, perception surveys, social network analysis, participatory monitoring and evaluation, and mixed-method assessments.
They also urged federal and state governments to institutionalise peace measurement frameworks based on standardised indicators relating to trust, inclusion, resilience and perceptions of security.
The analysts further called for stronger collaboration among security agencies, humanitarian organisations, development partners and peacebuilding groups to enhance evidence-sharing and avoid duplication of efforts.
They maintained that the success of peacebuilding programmes should not be measured by the number of activities conducted, but by whether they make communities safer, more inclusive and more resilient.
