What’s new? In 2019, Nigerian authorities launched a ten-year National Livestock Transformation Plan to curtail the movement of cattle, boost livestock production and quell the country’s lethal herder-farmer conflict. But inadequate political leadership, delays, funding uncertainties and a lack of expertise could derail the project. COVID-19 has exacerbated the challenges.
Why did it happen? Violence fuelled by environmental degradation and competition over land has aggravated long-running tensions in the country’s northern and central regions. A surge in bloodshed in 2018 prompted Nigeria’s federal government to formulate a far-reaching set of reforms for the livestock sector.
Why does it matter? The new Plan represents Nigeria’s most comprehensive strategy yet to encourage pastoralists to switch to ranching and other sedentary livestock production systems. Modernising the livestock sector is key to resolving the herder-farmer conflict, which threatens Nigeria’s
Resilient water infrastructure design brief
Format
Objective: Resilience
A 2019 report by the World Bank, entitled “Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity,” estimated that low- and middle-income countries lose $390 billion each year to disruptions of power, transportation, water, and telecommunications services caused by natural hazards (World Bank 2019). The disrupted services are typically delivered through large networks that are vulnerable to natural hazards over a large area. Improving the resilience of those networks would cost about 3 percent of their capital investment, but the avoided disruptions would save quadruple that amount. In other words, every dollar spent to improve resilience would avoid four dollars in costs owing to service disruptions. The cost reduction associated with spending on resilience is estimated to be $4.2 trillion over the useful life of new infrastructure (World Bank 2019).