Nigeria Watch Presentation

Discover the project

Nigeria Watch 1

Nigeria Watch (NW) is a database that monitors and compiles violent deaths, including accidents, crimes, conflicts, natural disasters, occurring in Nigeria since 1 June 2006.

It relies principally on ten Nigerian daily newspapers, which are analysed by information retrieval specialists on a daily basis. Other sources of information, such as human rights organisations and Federal security agencies, are used to cross-check data and mitigate methodological biases.

Nigeria Watch website: http://www.nigeriawatch.org/

NW provides the research community, policy makers, security experts and the general public with concrete data on violence in Nigeria. It thereby helps decision makers and other stakeholders to monitor violence by providing an original set of data. In a country where there are few statistics on crime, the database helps to cross-check various sources of information to give trends of violence.

Nigeria Watch was established in 2006 by French researcher Prof. Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, of the University of Paris 8. Since July 2013, the project has been implemented under the scientific supervision of IFRA-Nigeria at the University of Ibadan, with funding from the DFID/British Council, and as part of the Nigeria Stability and Reconciliation Programme.

Methodology

Nigeria Watch distributes a newsletter, Fatality Trends, to partner institutions every four months. The project also provides grants to researchers to write 30-page reports on specific issues (i.e. land conflicts in a precise area, piracy, election-related violence, etc.), combining fieldwork and NW data.

Violent events are recorded from 1st June 2006 according to:

their date (from day 1 to day n): a violent event happens in one or several contiguous LGAs and terminates when there are no deaths recorded during seven continuous days or more;
location: state, local government area (LGA), town, village or “offshore zone”. The location of an event is normally based on the place where violences happens; exceptionaly, on the place where the bodies of the victims are found if there are no other information available. There are 36 states, one FCT (Federal Capital Territory) and 774 LGAs listed in the 1999 Constitution (including 6 Local Council Areas in the FCT). Violent events at sea or by the seaside are attached to one of the nearest 24 coastal LGAs or distributed among the coastal LGAs of one of the 8 maritime states (6 in Lagos, 1 in Ogun, 1 in Ondo, 3 in Delta, 3 in Bayelsa, 5 in Rivers, 2 in Akwa Ibom, 3 in Cross River). Since the settlement of the border conflict with Cameroon in 2006, Bakassi LGA has been cut in two;
adapted and updated population figures per LGA based on the 1991 & 2006 census and the annual growth rate as calculated per state. Because of the creation of 7 new states and 219 new LGAs between the 1991 and 2006 census, it was not possible to calculate an annual growth rate per Local Government;
protagonists and stakeholders (more details on: http://www.nigeriawatch.org/index.php?html=4)