The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Office for Strategic Preparedness and Resilience (OSPRE) – National Centre for the Coordination of Early Warning and Response Mechanism Centre, Nigeria, have commenced the country resilience and human security assessment programme in Nigeria.
Other partners in the project include the Fund for Peace, the European Union, the German Government, amongst others.
Speaking during a technical workshop in Abuja, the Director-General, OSPRE, Chris Ngwodo, disclosed that the meeting was an inception dialogue, the inaugural workshop for the commencement of the country resilience and human security assessment for Nigeria.
Ngwodo also revealed that it is a study that is being undertaken across West Africa and Nigeria is the first country to undertake it.
He said: “It is aimed at mapping human security, vulnerabilities, and resilience factors within our country.”
He further explained that the objective of the committee was to have an understanding of the complex issues that underline conflicts and instability within Nigeria.
He added that: “We want to mark the resilience factors that can help us become better to combating those issues, issues that engender conflict and strife, and above all, we want to be able to create empirical data that can be used to inform policy interventions by the government.”
He stated that the exercise is sequel to an earlier one, ‘Human Security Vulnerability Assessment carried out in 2018 and the findings have been very useful in helping to establish Early Warning Systems across West Africa and in Nigeria as well.
He said in the course of the exercise, the team will be visiting both hotspots and places that have proven resilience to conflict and strife.
Ngwodo said on the visits that this is: “Because we want to understand the resilience factors as well, not just the vulnerabilities.
“Not just the drivers of conflict, but we want to understand what makes certain places resilient in the face of conflict.”
