Weekly Conflict Reports

The European Union (EU) is implementing a peacebuilding and conflict transformation project in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, with the overall goal of fostering inclusive community security approaches to address the systemic drivers of violence and criminality in Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers States. Search for Common Ground (Search) in consortium with the Foundation for Partnerships in the Niger Delta (PIND), Academic Associates PeaceWorks (AAPW), and Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN) is executing the EU-Niger Delta project. Bringing together four leading peacebuilding and development organizations in the Niger Delta, the consortium offers a holistic, community-centered approach to addressing core drivers of criminality, violence, and conflict in the region, with a specific focus on the empowerment and inclusion of youth in the security of their respective communities in the Niger Delta.

The consortium partners will leverage existing relationships with the project’s diverse target groups, including at-risk youth, local communities impacted by oil production and oil bunkering, state security actors, the private sector, journalists and media actors, key civil society organizations, and policymakers at the state, regional, national, and international levels, to secure broad-based buy-in and participation in the project. Overall, the project will seek to initiate a shift in the way that relevant actors think about and approach issues of oil bunkering, criminality, and security in the Niger Delta in favor of a bottom-up, human-centered perspective. This institutional and social shift is necessary to sustainably reduce the prevalence of oil bunkering and other forms of criminality and violence in the region in the long term.