The project was an EU-funded peacebuilding initiative, implemented by a consortium that included SDN, Search for Common Ground, and the Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND). The consortium collaborated across 66 communities in Rivers, Bayelsa, and Delta States, integrating research, community engagement, conflict transformation, peacebuilding, and livelihood support to tackle the interconnected causes of criminality and violence. 

The project acknowledged that insecurity in the Niger Delta cannot be resolved through security measures alone. Factors such as economic exclusion, weak governance, environmental degradation, limited opportunities for young people, and unresolved community disputes can create conditions conducive to criminal activities and violence. Therefore, the project combined community-led peacebuilding efforts with livelihood opportunities while generating evidence to better understand how criminality and violence operate across the region. 

SDN directly engaged with 16 communities, focusing on strengthening community leadership and conflict transformation, promoting dialogue, supporting locally led initiatives for peace and security, developing alternative livelihoods, and generating evidence on the dynamics of crime and violence. The consortium’s broader efforts across 66 communities established a regional platform for learning and engagement.

What the programme sought to change

SDN’s approach was built around the idea that communities need both the capacity to manage conflict peacefully and viable economic alternatives to criminal enterprise. The intervention therefore worked with community leaders and young people to strengthen their ability to prevent and manage conflict, while supporting communities to develop livelihood initiatives based on locally identified needs. It also sought to strengthen community-level security responses and generate evidence that could challenge simplistic explanations of criminality and inform more effective approaches to peace and security.

Building the Evidence

A major component of the programme was SDN’s landmark research, Devil’s Workshop, which examined why crime and violence persist across the Niger Delta and challenged explanations that place the primary responsibility on supposedly “idle” or unemployed young people.

The research drew on nine focus group discussions, 165 interviews and a survey of more than 12,700 citizens across 66 communities in Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers States, covering the period from 2019 to 2024. It identified seven interconnected forms of crime and violence: theft and robbery, kidnapping, cult gangs, illegal oil bunkering, piracy, herder-farmer clashes and political violence.

Rather than treating these as isolated security problems, the study examined how they intersect with economic exclusion, weak governance, environmental degradation and criminal economies, including the role of actors with access to political and economic power. Its findings provided the evidence base for the programme’s community-level interventions and helped shift attention from individual explanations of criminality towards the wider systems and conditions that sustain violence.

The programme’s results were most evident at the community level, where peacebuilding and livelihood interventions led to significant changes in how local actors understood, managed, and responded to conflict. Community leaders and young people developed stronger conflict management skills. 

• • The programme trained 120 community leaders in inclusive leadership and conflict transformation, with women making up 45% of participants. After the training, 85% of these leaders showed increased knowledge. Additionally, 120 young people across 24 communities were trained in conflict transformation and non-adversarial engagement, with women representing 44% of participants. These youth recorded an average knowledge increase of 46%, with 78% demonstrating improved understanding. 
  • More importantly, this newly acquired capacity was applied to real disputes. Over 15 intra- and inter-communal conflicts were fully resolved, including a decades-long kingship dispute in Ashaka (Ndokwa East Local Government Area, Delta State), a land-boundary dispute between Abuator and Okoriko, neighbouring communities in Ndokwa East LGA, that had escalated to the brink of violent confrontation, and a leadership dispute in Oparaukwu, where the parties voluntarily withdrew their court cases. These examples illustrate how locally facilitated dialogue created alternatives to prolonged litigation and potential violence      .
  • Communities also began developing economic alternatives to criminal enterprises. A needs assessment, validated by 268 community representatives, led to the support of 16 community-owned livelihood initiatives, one in each of SDN’s target communities. Examples include cassava processing mills with grinding machines, hydraulic pressers and fryers in Ashaka, Abuator, Sagbama, Agbere, Nedugo and Otuasega; solar-powered water boreholes; and a shared speedboat for the fishing and coastal communities of Esanma and Ovwian. These initiatives were designed not just as income-generating projects, but as locally identified alternatives to strengthen economic resilience and reduce vulnerability to criminal economies.
  • The programme also engaged with community security actors. Vigilante groups in Sagbama and Agbere, both in Sagbama Local Government Area, Bayelsa State, received training in intelligence gathering, crime response, and human rights-respecting policing, promoting a shift towards more accountable community security practices. 

• In Ohoror (Ughelli North LGA, Delta State), a community drug-abuse campaign was linked to reported reductions in drug activity. Community testimony described the change as significant: one resident recalled as many as five young people in the community severely affected by drug abuse before the campaign began, with conditions improving markedly afterwards as former dealers transitioned to legitimate livelihoods such as running provisional stores. 

This highlights how the programme connected prevention, community action, and economic alternatives rather than solely treating drug-related crime as a law enforcement issue. Together, these interventions demonstrate the programme’s community-centred approach: strengthening communities’ ability to resolve disputes before they escalate into violence, enhancing local actors’ capacity to respond to insecurity, and creating economic alternatives that reduce vulnerability to criminal enterprises.

Your support funds continued community monitoring, livelihood support and conflict-resolution training across the Niger Delta.

Delivered by SDN in partnership with Search for Common Ground and PIND and funded by the European Union.