By Abayomi Afolabi
On 21 September, the world marks the International Day of Peace. This year’s United Nations theme — “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day” asks a relatively simple question: what if peace were not something we wait for governments and diplomats to deliver, but something built, in small and consistent ways, every single day? In Nigeria’s North-West and North-Central states, where the Strengthening Peace and Resilience in Nigeria (SPRiNG) Programme works, I have been watching everyday regular Nigerians answer that question through their actions.
Nigeria’s peace and security challenges are well documented: competition over shrinking grazing land and water, the collapse of trust between farming and pastoralist communities, the exclusion of women and young people from decisions that shape their own safety. These are not abstract policy problems. They are the reason a family cannot plant with confidence, the reason a community braces itself every dry season. Peace, as this year’s theme shows, is not the absence of these problems on a map. It is the lived, daily experience of safety, dignity and cooperation, or the daily absence of it.
What I have learned, working with partners is that the people best positioned to close that gap are rarely the ones with the loudest titles. They are the “everyday architects of peace” this year’s theme asks us to honour: a farmer willing to sit across from a herder he has never trusted; a woman prepared to speak in a room that has never let women speak; a community that decides, together, to solve its own problem rather than wait for someone else to solve it. Nigeria has no shortage of these architects. What it lacks is the investment and platform to let their work at scale. This year’s theme suggests four small, common-sense steps each of us can take. Nigeria’s own experience, and SPRiNG’s work alongside it, offers proof that they work.
The first is to give your time, simply to show up. In Daudu community, Guma LGA, Benue state, years of clashes between crop farmers and pastoralists had hardened into mutual suspicion, with cattle encroaching on farmland and stock routes blocked in retaliation. With support of SPRiNG, GoGreen organised training and dialogue sessions, it asked people to do something that was inconceivable in the contexts of distrust; sit in the same room. What came out of it was something neither side expected, agreement on designated grazing pathways, and a new arrangement in which pastoralists now pay farmers for crop residue as livestock feed, turning what was once waste, and once a source of conflict, into shared income. Nobody signed a peace treaty in Daudu. They simply agreed to keep talking and let cooperation follow.
The second is to lend your voice, especially where it has historically been silenced. For over two centuries, the Otukpo District Traditional Council in Benue State had never had a woman among its ranks. With support from SPRiNG, Elohim Development Foundation trained women in early warning, leadership, and the Women, Peace and Security framework. As a result, the women formed the Network of Women Peace Advocates and began the patient work of advocacy, visiting elders, engaging youth leaders, making their case respectfully but persistently. Today, a woman sits on that Council for the first time in its history. In Jato-Aka, Kwande LGA, Benue State, a similar quiet transformation produced Mary Doosn Terzungwe, the first woman to chair the community’s Crisis Management Team. “Before, women could not talk when men were speaking,” one participant told us. “Now women can stand and share their ideas.” That sentence captures more about sustainable peace than any policy document I have read.
The third is to host what the United Nations calls a Peace Circle, a shared, intergenerational conversation, and it can look remarkably unglamorous. In Ganawuri, Riyom LGA, Plateau State, our partner Sahel Consulting organised a World Food Day cooking show that put pastoralist and farming women in the same “kitchen”, preparing local dishes side by side. It sounds small. But as Alhaji Saleh Salihu, the local Ardo, put it, many interventions had come to his community before, but none had done as much for peace, because peace “remains the most important foundation upon which every other intervention can thrive.” Watching women who once had only transactional encounters share laughter and friendly competition gave him, in his words, renewed confidence that peace is possible. Dialogue does not always need a conference table. Sometimes it needs a cooking pot.
The fourth is to use your platform to tell a story of peace and hope,which is precisely what this column is attempting. In Jos South, twenty women and local leaders sat down this past May, a meeting no donor had called or scheduled, to decide for themselves what peace in their community should look like. The Local Action Plan Implementation Committee they had inaugurated only weeks earlier put that commitment to the test almost immediately, picking up early warning signs of rising tension in Gero community (in Jos South), and launching a dialogue mission that helped prevent it from turning violent. Jos South’s peace, like Daudu’s and Otukpo’s, was not delivered from outside. It was built, argued for and sustained by people who decided their community was worth the effort, and it deserves to be told, so that others recognise the model and repeat it.
Nigeria’s own experience offers a fifth lesson, beyond the UN’s four: solve a shared problem together, deliberately, rather than let it keep dividing you. In Danan community, Bokkos LGA, Plateau, a disappearing river once meant a yearly ritual of failed crops, thirsty livestock and rising tension between farmers and herders competing for what little water remained. Barnabas David Machen, having learned climate-smart resource management through our partner Crest research and development institute (CRADI), mobilised his neighbours,farmers and herders together to find groundwater and install a solar-powered pump with clearly demarcated corridors for people, crops and cattle. “Water used to divide us,” he told us. “Now it brings us together.” In Jema’a LGA, a coalition of farmers, herders, traditional leaders, youth and women took the same approach to a stock route blocked for years, mapping the old path together and negotiating its reopening with traditional authorities. That route, now open again and reconnecting to the wider transhumance corridor toward Bauchi State, has done more than restore a pathway for cattle. It has restored a habit of working things out together.
None of this is to suggest that community initiative alone can substitute for the harder architecture of peace: functioning security institutions, fair justice systems, and policies that reach the communities they are written for. SPRiNG’s work sits deliberately at the intersection of both, supporting institutions and policy while investing in the everyday architects who make them real.
As we mark the International Day of Peace this year, my appeal to every reader, policymaker, community leader, or citizen, is the one this year’s theme makes: do not wait for peace to be built in a conference room on your behalf. Give an hour to a conversation you have been avoiding. Speak up in a room that has not made space for you. Sit down with a community you have never sat with. Solve one shared problem, together. And when it works, as it has in Daudu, Otukpo, Jato-Aka, Ganawuri, Danan, Jema’a and Jos South, tell someone. Peace, everywhere, is invested one ordinary decision at a time.
(Abayomi Afolabi is Communications Specialist of the SPRiNG Programme, a UK FCDO-funded initiative working to reduce conflict and support communities in Nigeria’s North-West and North-Central states to adapt to effects of climate change)
