842 Killed, 279 Kidnapped Across Nigeria In May — Report

No fewer than 842 people were killed and 279 others abducted in 156 violent incidents recorded across Nigeria in May 2026, according to fresh data from Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database.

The figures, contained in a statement released on Sunday, highlight a worsening security situation in the country, with violent incidents rising by 51.5 per cent, fatalities increasing by 90.1 per cent, and kidnappings climbing by 19.7 per cent compared to the same period in 2025.

The latest statistics come amid growing concerns over the effectiveness of peacebuilding initiatives despite substantial investments by governments, development partners and civil society organisations.

The concerns were raised in a policy article titled: “The Travails of Measuring Peacebuilding in Fragile Contexts,” authored by development practitioner and researcher at Nextier, Jamilu Musa, and Dr. Chukwuma Okoli, Visiting Lead for Research and Policy at Nextier and a lecturer in Political Science at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka.

The experts argued that weak impact assessment frameworks continue to undermine efforts to determine whether peacebuilding interventions are producing meaningful results.

According to them, while dialogue sessions, awareness campaigns and community engagements remain important, the true measure of peacebuilding lies in its ability to reduce violence, build trust, strengthen resilience and promote social cohesion.

Musa and Okoli noted that the need for effective evaluation has become even more urgent as international funding for peacebuilding programmes continues to shrink.

They attributed the funding challenges to competing global crises, including the prolonged Russia-Ukraine conflict and tensions in the Middle East, which have redirected donor attention and resources. They also pointed to shifting economic priorities in major donor countries, including protectionist policies associated with United States President Donald Trump’s economic nationalism.

The analysts explained that evaluating peacebuilding outcomes is often more complex than assessing conventional development projects because key indicators such as trust, resilience, perceptions of safety and social cohesion are largely intangible and difficult to quantify.

To improve assessment processes, they identified four critical indicators for measuring peacebuilding success in fragile environments: conflict dynamics, social cohesion, governance and inclusion, as well as resilience and conflict prevention.

According to them, conflict dynamics help track patterns of violence such as kidnappings and communal clashes, while social cohesion measures trust and cooperation within and between communities.

They 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 evaluates the ability of communities to prevent conflicts from escalating.

Despite these indicators, the experts acknowledged that measuring peacebuilding outcomes remains challenging due to factors such as attribution bias, short donor funding cycles, rapidly changing conflict environments, poor baseline data, security limitations in conflict zones and the difficulty of assessing intangible outcomes.

“Peace is not static; it is a work in progress involving both reducing conflict and increasing development,” the analysts stated.

They recommended the adoption of modern evaluation approaches, including outcome harvesting, conflict-sensitive monitoring, perception surveys, social network analysis, participatory monitoring and evaluation, and mixed-method assessments.

The experts also urged federal and state governments to institutionalise peace measurement frameworks based on standardised indicators of trust, inclusion, resilience and perceptions of security.

They further called for stronger collaboration among security agencies, humanitarian organisations, development partners and peacebuilding groups to improve evidence-sharing and avoid duplication of efforts.

According to them, the success of peacebuilding initiatives should not be measured solely by the number of activities conducted but by whether communities become safer, more inclusive and more resilient in the face of persistent security threats.