The Conflict Research Network West Africa (CORN), a non-governmental organisation, has launched the Nigeria Peace Web (NPW), a digital platform designed to document structured data on peace initiatives and related events across the country.
The NPW is a open-source digital platform developed under the Nigeria Peace Actors and Initiatives in Data (NPAID) project and is supported by the Strengthening Peace and Resilience in Nigeria (SPRiNG) programme.
Speaking at the launch of the NPW, the Executive Director of CORN West Africa, Dr. Timpreye Felix Allison, said the open-source digital platform was designed to help government institutions improve situational awareness and planning, while also supporting donors in the more strategic allocation of resources and reducing duplication.
“For civil society, it strengthens collaboration and increases visibility of local initiatives, and for researchers it enables systematic analysis of peacebuilding trends,” he said
Represented by Obinna Chukwuezie, an official of CORN West Africa, Allison said Nigeria’s conflict landscape is extensively documented, noting that violent incidents, armed actors and insecurity trends are routinely tracked by national and international monitoring systems.
“However, the same cannot be said of the peace landscape. Across the country,community mediators, faith leaders, civil society organisations, traditional authorities, women’s networks, youth groups and state peace agencies work daily to prevent violence and manage tensions,” Allison said.
“Yet there is no national system that systematically documents who is building peace, where these efforts take place,how they operate, and what lessons they generate.
“This gap creates a structural imbalance in the evidence base informing peace and security policy. Policymakers, donors and researchers often have detailed visibility of violent events but limited visibility of preventive and peacebuilding activity.
“As a result, policy attention and funding tend to prioritise crisis response over prevention. At the operational level, organisations struggle to identify existing initiatives, potential partners or lessons from past interventions.”
According to Allison, this challenge was confirmed during research conducted with actors within the peacebuilding ecosystem, who said they often rely on personal networks, costly field visits, and fragmented documentation to identify ongoing initiatives.
“Smaller community-led interventions, often the first responder to local tensions, remain largely invisible beyond the immediate contexts.
“When projects end, documentation is rarely preserved in accessible repositories, resulting in the loss of institutional knowledge,” he said.