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Nigerian Civil Society Working Group

The Priority Sustainable: Nigerian Civil Society Working Group represents over 20 civil society organizations across Nigeria working to strengthen communities, systems, and implementation of policies to better support and protect against insecurity fueled by terrorism, banditry, and crime. These issues of insecurity and instability are fueled by entrenched conflict, historical grievances, poverty, lack of access to systems and services, injustice, under-representation, and corruption - made worse with physical realities such as drought which estrange neighboring tribes and communities as they compete for land, food, and water. These problems have solutions. These solutions are practical and can be scaled. These civil society organizations are just a handful of hundreds doing this work for as recently as a couple of years to literal decades.

The Priority Sustainable: Nigerian Civil Society Working Group represents over 20 civil society organizations across Nigeria. Partners to this effort represent civil society organizations from Lagos and Abuja to northern Nigeria, leaders who have worked with international partners as well as smaller and underconnected groups, groups working to directly strengthen their communities and those who engage high-policy - all playing crucial roles in supporting strong communities towards a future with less terrorism, violent extremism, crime, and instability.


The Priority Sustainable: Nigerian Civil Society Working Group is a volunteer participation working group working to strengthen pathways between civil society organizations, practitioners, policymakers across sectors and levels. The main objective of this working group is to make more visible the local civil society organizations working in ways that are likely to support effective and sustainable (lasting) prevention of violence and terrorism through their approaches to address needs of communities. In this vein, this working group also hopes to publish reports highlighting the context, insights, approaches, specific projects, gaps in the systems, and recommendations to support that end.


The Nigerian Civil Society Working Group has shared countless local insights in individual semi-structured interviews and group meetings over the past 3-years, sharing the context and recommendations necessary to drive positive and lasting change. These insights have been explicitly briefed to officials at U.S. Department of State, U.S. Embassy, among others.


Core to this effort is intentionally citing and sharing the names of individuals and organizations when possible. Citing and naming is always done with participant permission, with a predominant percentage wishing to be cited. The hope is that this effort supports a shrinking civic space and challenges the practices of siloing and gatekeeping partners and information. Practices that have the potential to do more harm than good. In the spirit of the well known Les Brown quote - the world will not be made a better place with the amount of information that dies on well-intentioned peoples' onedriv**.

"The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry our their dream." ~ Les Brown

In a shifting global development landscape there is an explicit opportunity to reform and reshape localization - to partner better, more effectively, and in ways that better support lasting and positive outcomes. To move away from a colonial or victim framing and to co-create by leaning into respect and acknowledging that t-shirts and pictures alone are not building legitimacy or solving problems. Lasting impact is less flashy - it means building from what what has been done, not doing it again with your organization or country's logo on it. When adjustments, improvements that can be done today are prioritized & actors pass-the-baton where it needs to go to further progress, and when leaders facilitate and back those efforts, progress can be institutionalized and thus sustained.


As of November 2025 this effort receives no funding or institutional backing - it continues pro-bono due to its importance and to fulfill promises made, such as publication and visibility, which encouraged participation by local actors in the first place - contact prioritysustainable@gmail.com with interest to support publications, events, and briefings/engagement with policymakers.

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