The statistics are staggering. Between 2016 and 2024, farmer-herder clashes in Benue State killed an estimated 3,500 people. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Entire villages were emptied. Despite multiple presidential intervention committees, state emergency laws, and international NGO programmes, the violence persisted.
ENPUAI took a different approach. Rather than targeting leaders and policymakers, we went to young people — the ones who were actually perpetrating and experiencing the violence at ground level. We recruited twenty Tiv youth and twenty Fulani youth from Guma and Logo local government areas, trained them together for ten days in conflict resolution, community mapping, and collaborative problem-solving.
The young people themselves identified what the high-level negotiations had missed: grazing corridors that existed on colonial-era maps but had been blocked by farmland expansion; seasonal market access that had been informally withdrawn; and a revenge cycle driven by a small group of individuals on both sides who benefited financially from instability.
Working with ENPUAI facilitators, the youth ambassadors produced a community-level Land Access Protocol that was adopted by three communities in 2024. The protocol creates seasonal grazing schedules, joint monitoring patrols, and a rapid escalation contact list — bypassing the slow formal response systems.
In the nine months since adoption, the three pilot communities have seen a 78% reduction in reported land access disputes. Two Fulani families who fled in 2022 have returned. The youth ambassadors are now training a second cohort.
“The government says they are solving the problem from Abuja. We are solving it from the ground.” — Emmanuel Torver, Youth Peace Ambassador, Benue