Nigeria Peace Web launched to track peacebuilding initiatives nationwide and improve coordination among government, donors and civil society actors

Stakeholders in Nigeria’s peacebuilding ecosystem on Thursday called for the creation of a national framework to systematically track and document peace initiatives across conflict-affected communities, as they unveiled the Nigeria Peace Web, a new digital platform designed to map peacebuilding efforts nationwide.

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The call was made during the launch of the platform, which aims to improve the visibility of preventive actions and strengthen coordination among policymakers, researchers, donors and civil society groups working to promote stability.

Speaking at the event, the Executive Director of the Conflict Research Network West Africa, Timpreye Allison, said Nigeria’s conflict landscape is widely documented but peacebuilding activities often remain underreported.

“Across the country, community mediators, faith leaders, civil society organisations, traditional authorities, women’s networks, youth groups and state peace agencies work daily to prevent violence and manage tensions,” Allison said.

Despite these ongoing efforts, he noted that Nigeria currently lacks a national system capable of systematically documenting who is building peace, where the initiatives take place, how they operate and the lessons they generate.

According to him, the absence of such a framework has created a critical gap in the evidence base that informs national peace and security policies.

“This gap creates a structural imbalance in the evidence base informing peace and security policy. Policymakers, donors and researchers often have detailed visibility of violent events but limited visibility of preventive and peacebuilding activity,” Allison said.

He warned that the imbalance often shifts policy attention and funding toward crisis response rather than prevention.

At the operational level, organisations also struggle to identify existing initiatives, potential partners and lessons from previous interventions.

Research conducted among actors within the peacebuilding ecosystem revealed that many organisations currently depend on personal networks, costly field visits and fragmented documentation to locate ongoing initiatives.

Allison explained that smaller community-led interventions, which are often the first to respond to emerging tensions, frequently remain invisible beyond their immediate environments.

“When projects end, documentation is rarely preserved in accessible repositories, resulting in the loss of institutional knowledge,” he added.

The Nigeria Peace Web was developed to address this gap by aggregating structured data on peace actors, initiatives and peace-related events across the country.

As an open-source platform, the tool is expected to help government institutions improve situational awareness and planning, assist donors in allocating resources more strategically and reduce duplication of peace interventions.

For civil society organisations, the platform is designed to encourage collaboration and amplify the visibility of grassroots peace efforts, while also enabling researchers to analyse emerging peacebuilding trends across Nigeria.

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Stakeholders expressed optimism that the initiative could become a powerful resource for strengthening preventive diplomacy and fostering a more coordinated approach to peacebuilding nationwide.