At least 279 people were kidnapped across Nigeria in May 2026, while the country recorded 156 violent incidents that resulted in 842 deaths, according to new data from Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database.

The figures, contained in a statement released on Sunday, showed a significant increase in insecurity compared with the same period in 2025.

According to the report, violent incidents increased by 51.5 per cent, casualties rose by 90.1 per cent, while the number of kidnapping victims grew by 19.7 per cent compared with May 2025.

The latest data comes amid concerns that ongoing peacebuilding efforts in Nigeria have yet to produce measurable improvements despite substantial investments by governments and development partners.

In a policy article titled “The Travails of Measuring Peacebuilding in Fragile Contexts,” development practitioner and Nextier research professional Jamilu Musa and Dr Chukwuma Okoli, Visiting Lead for Research and Policy at Nextier and a Political Science lecturer at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, highlighted challenges affecting the evaluation of peacebuilding programmes.

The experts argued that weak impact assessment systems are limiting the ability to determine whether interventions are effectively reducing conflicts and improving security outcomes.

They explained that peacebuilding should not be measured only by the number of dialogue sessions, workshops or awareness campaigns conducted, but by whether such efforts reduce violence, build trust, strengthen community resilience and promote social cohesion.

According to them, the need to measure peacebuilding outcomes has become more urgent due to declining international funding, partly caused by competing global crises such as the prolonged Russo-Ukrainian War and conflicts in the Middle East.

They also noted that changing global economic priorities, including protectionist policies linked to US President Donald Trump’s economic agenda, have affected funding support for peacebuilding initiatives in countries like Nigeria.

The researchers said assessing peacebuilding success remains difficult because many important outcomes, including trust, resilience, public perception of safety and social cohesion, are difficult to measure.

They identified four major indicators that should guide peacebuilding assessments in fragile environments: conflict dynamics, social cohesion, governance and inclusion, and resilience or conflict prevention.

According to the experts, conflict dynamics help monitor changes in violence patterns, including kidnapping and communal clashes, while social cohesion measures the level of trust and cooperation among communities.

They explained that governance and inclusion assess public confidence in institutions and the participation of women, youths and vulnerable groups in decision-making processes.

Resilience, they added, focuses on how effectively communities can prevent conflicts from escalating and respond to emerging threats.

However, the experts noted that several challenges continue to hinder effective measurement of peacebuilding efforts.

They listed these challenges as attribution bias, short funding cycles from donors, changing conflict situations, difficulty in measuring intangible outcomes, inadequate baseline data and security challenges affecting data collection in conflict-affected areas.

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

To improve the evaluation of peacebuilding initiatives, they recommended the use of modern assessment methods, including outcome harvesting, most significant change analysis, conflict-sensitive monitoring, perception surveys, social network analysis, participatory monitoring and evaluation, as well as mixed-method approaches.

They also called on federal and state governments to establish structured peace measurement systems using standard indicators that track trust, inclusion, resilience and public perceptions of security.

The experts further encouraged stronger cooperation among security agencies, humanitarian organisations, development partners and peacebuilding groups to improve information sharing and prevent duplication of efforts.

They concluded that measuring the number of activities carried out is not enough, stressing that the key question is whether peacebuilding interventions are making communities safer, more inclusive and more capable of resisting future conflicts.