Violent Conflict and Smallholder Agriculture in Nigeria: Mapping available data and remaining gaps

Conflict poses a significant threat to smallholder agriculture globally, undermining food security, livelihoods, and rural development. Recent advances in the availability, granularity and coverage of micro-level data on both violent conflict, and agricultural activity, have the potential to unlock new understandings and insights. These, in turn, may point to effective policies and practices to ultimately support and enhance more sustainable and equitable agricultural activity in conflict-affected contexts. However, with a proliferation of potential data sources, mapping available evidence, and persistent gaps, is critical to i) ensure a comprehensive understanding of the existing data landscape; ii) reduce duplication and unnecessary use of resources in recreating data already available; iii) facilitate effective leveraging of under-utilised opportunities for data integration; and iv) reliably identify persistent gaps and prioritise for future data generation. For this reason, this brief sets out to map available evidence and remaining gaps in relation to violent conflict and smallholder agriculture in contemporary Nigeria.