Fostering dialogue in Nigeria to reduce agro-pastoral conflicts

Farmer-Herder conflicts are a critical challenge in all Sahelian countries. The complexity of conflicts has been growing over the past 10 years, especially in Nigeria, due to tensions over resources access, declining trust between communities, and violent groups exploiting existing intercommunal tensions. Additionally, in contexts of considerable environmental pressures, nomadic herders are pushed into farmer territory which triggers conflict and violence (McGuirk and Nunn, 2024; Eberle et al., 2020).

Disputes arise over livestock trampling or eating crops, blocked cattle routes, or the poisoning of cattle through herbicides and pesticides. Oftentimes, these disputes turn violent. In Nigeria’s Middle Belt Region alone, farmer-herder violence is responsible for an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 deaths every year (International Crisis Group, 2017; ACLED, 2022; ACLED, 2023). The anticipation of violence by each group severely undermines investment incentives and productivity of both farmers and herders. This creates a vicious cycle of violence causing poverty, which itself exacerbates the conditions that lead to conflict.

This pattern of escalating conflict has led communities to stop interacting with each other. Farmer and herder communities in the Middle Belt Region of Nigeria now live mostly in separate villages with little day-to-day contact between the groups. According to baseline data from the study (2019-2021), over 60% of the leaders report that the farmers and herders live in separate villages which are on average 2.2km apart from each other. Only 44% of these communities share a common market.

In such a context, it is possible that a lack of contact between groups can break down communication and make it harder to resolve disputes. The problem of insecurity from farmer-herder conflict does not just affect farming and herding villages, but the whole of Nigeria’s Middle Belt, including towns and urban areas, given the extent to which violence can spread throughout the region.

The project aims to reduce the prevalence of conflict and disputes between farmers and herders by enhancing inter-group trust, forming social networks, fostering cooperation or building institutions for conflict resolution. It sets out to understand how promoting contact between farmers and herders affects the prevalence of cooperation, disputes and violence between these groups. To this end, the NGO Search for Common Ground (SFCG) developed and implemented inter-dialogues sessions gathering from 56 to 60 herders and farmers for each dialogue. In partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), this approach was rigorously tested through a randomized controlled trial (RCT), to evaluate whether contact between farmers and herders through inter-dialogues can reduce farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria and generate evidence helpful for similar contexts in other Sahelian countries. Two types of these dialogues were organized:

• A series of workshops focused on a topic of common interest, health and not addressing the conflict between communities;
• Another, on the contrary, focused on conflict resolution, explicitly put up for discussion.

In addition, FID funding supported a smartphone-based survey conducted in three states—Benue, Nasarawa, and Plateau. This survey involved distributing smartphones to one knowledgeable farmer and one herder per community pair, along with specific training, to enable the regular collection of data on conflict-related issues. The aim of this survey was to generate more frequent and higher-quality data than in-person surveys, which primarily captured effects up to one year after the interventions took place.

Perspective from Search for Common Ground

From the perspective of the NGO Search for Common Ground, these findings validate Search's global approach: localized dialogue is a critical catalyst, but it cannot serve as a standalone fix in fluid conflict settings. To build durable peace, horizontal dialogue must be wrapped within a multi-tiered portfolio. Furthermore, conflict resolution interventions need to be sustained and continuously reinforced to produce meaningful and lasting outcomes. Search couples community-level dialogue with different activities such as mass media campaigns to broadcast peace norms, and vertical policy advocacy to legally bind resource agreements. Future research could investigate if other Search for Common Ground interventions that combine contact with broader peace building tools, could offer a viable alternative.

Research team:

• Soeren Henn is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research lies at the intersection of economic development and political economy, with a focus on fragile states, informal institutions, and conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
• Oeindrila Dube is the Philip K. Pearson Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. She is affiliated with J-PAL, where she serves on the Board and co-chairs the Crime and Violence Sector. Her research examines the political and economic development of societies, with a focus on how cognitive tools can reshape human behavior and on how AI can be leveraged to enhance productivity and promote economic development.
• James A. Robinson is a University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences.