The Conflict Research Network West Africa (CORN West Africa) has called for stronger documentation and visibility of peacebuilding initiatives across Nigeria as it hosted a high-level stakeholder dialogue on its digital peace data platform, the Nigeria Peace Web (NPW).
The engagement, held on Wednesday at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation Centre, brought together peacebuilding practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and development partners to assess and strengthen the platform designed to map peace actors, initiatives, and peace-related events across the country.
The dialogue served as both a user engagement session and a networking forum for key actors within Nigeria’s peacebuilding ecosystem, offering participants an opportunity to review the platform’s design, test its functionality, and provide feedback on its future development.
Speaking at the event, the Executive Director of CORN West Africa, Timipere Felix Allison, noted that while Nigeria’s conflict landscape is widely documented and analysed, the country’s peace efforts often remain largely invisible in research, policy discussions, and public discourse.
According to him, global monitoring systems regularly track violent incidents, armed groups, and insecurity trends, but rarely capture the everyday work carried out by communities to prevent violence and resolve tensions.
“Across Nigeria, community mediators, faith leaders, traditional authorities, women’s networks, youth groups, and civil society organisations work every day to prevent violence and manage tensions,” Allison said. “Yet much of that work remains undocumented, disconnected, and largely invisible.”
He explained that the Nigeria Peace Web was developed to help address this gap by providing an open-source digital platform that aggregates structured data on peace actors, initiatives, and peace-related events across the country.
The platform is being developed under the Nigeria Peace Actors and Initiatives in Data (NPAID) project, supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) through the Strengthening Peace and Resilience in Nigeria Programme (SPRiNG) implemented by Tetra Tech International Development.
Participants at the dialogue included representatives of civil society organisations, peacebuilding practitioners, research institutions, state peacebuilding commissions, policymakers, members of the diplomatic community, and development partners.
During the engagement, stakeholders broadly welcomed the initiative, describing it as a potentially transformative tool that could improve coordination, knowledge sharing, and evidence-based peacebuilding in Nigeria.
However, participants also highlighted several issues that require further refinement as the platform evolves.
One of the major concerns raised was the need for clearer definitions and classification criteria for what constitutes “peace activities.” Stakeholders noted that peacebuilding interventions can take different forms, ranging from mediation, dialogue forums, reconciliation initiatives, and peace education programmes to community development projects that help reduce tensions and prevent conflicts.
Participants also stressed the importance of establishing strong data verification mechanisms to ensure the credibility and reliability of information uploaded to the platform. Among the suggestions offered were transparent verification methodologies, multi-source validation systems, and moderation structures to ensure quality control.
Another recurring theme was the need to better capture grassroots peacebuilding efforts that often take place informally within communities.
Stakeholders observed that traditional leaders, religious institutions, youth groups, and informal mediators play critical roles in managing tensions and preventing violence, yet many of their activities remain undocumented due to limited digital visibility.
To address this challenge, participants recommended incorporating community-level reporting mechanisms, enabling offline documentation that can later be uploaded to the platform, and ensuring that both formal and informal actors are represented within the system.
Stakeholders also welcomed the concept of the Nigeria Peace Web as a national knowledge hub for peacebuilding initiatives. By providing a centralised repository of peace-related data, the platform could enable organisations to identify who is working where, reduce duplication of efforts, and highlight gaps where interventions are most needed.
Other recommendations included creating structured onboarding processes for contributors, defining user roles and permissions, introducing community feedback systems to maintain data integrity, and expanding documentation formats to include reports, images, and multimedia evidence of peace activities.
Participants further noted that a national peace data platform could significantly improve policy development and strategic planning within the peacebuilding sector. Systematic mapping of peace actors and initiatives, they said, would support evidence-based policymaking and help development partners identify priority areas for funding and collaboration.
The dialogue also underscored the importance of strengthening peace-focused narratives in the media. Participants suggested linking the platform to broader capacity-building initiatives, including training journalists and writers on peace journalism to ensure that stories about peacebuilding receive greater coverage alongside reports of conflict and violence.
CORN West Africa’s Head of Programme, Omolara Raji, expressed appreciation to stakeholders for their engagement and willingness to serve as early collaborators in refining the platform.
“If the Nigeria Peace Web is to succeed, it will be because peace actors across Nigeria choose to use it, shape it, and own it,” she said.
“Our collective goal is to move from fragmented, episodic peace interventions toward coordinated prevention and cumulative learning, so that peace becomes as visible, measurable, and strategically supported as conflict has long been.”
The Nigeria Peace Web is currently being piloted in Plateau State, Kaduna State, and Katsina State, with plans to expand the platform across all 36 states of the federation.
CORN West Africa emphasised that strengthening the documentation and visibility of peace initiatives is critical for building more coordinated, evidence-based, and sustainable peacebuilding efforts across Nigeria.
