VoxDev published this article by Jeffrey Bloem, Amy Damon, David C. Francis, and Harrison Mitchell on herder-farmer conflicts in Nigeria. The article discussed how as climate change stretches Nigeria’s dry seasons and disrupts traditional grazing patterns, tensions between nomadic herders and settled farmers fuel violent conflict—most intensely just before the planting season.
New research shows how repeated exposure to violence shifts labor patterns differently by gender and across agricultural seasons, according to the authors. “In Bloem, Damon, Francis, and Mitchell (2025), we study how smallholders respond to these problems, by combing detailed panel data of households and individuals from Nigeria’s General Household Survey (GHS) with data on violent events from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project,” the authors wrote. “With this data, we leverage variation across time and space to define our primary indicator of exposure to farmer-herder violence as the presence of farmer-herder violent conflict incidents within a 10-kilometer radius around households taking place within one month before the survey response. To assess previous exposure, we examine violent conflict incidents occurring in the same 10 km area and from one to six months before the survey.”
The authors wrote that their findings show that individuals in agricultural households make labor allocation decisions differently based on the timing of conflict exposure relative to three factors: the agricultural season, individual’s gender, and whether exposure represents a singular event or repeated event.
Read the study here.
Read the full article here.