In nearly every community I have worked in across Plateau State, I have heard some version of the same sentence: “We used to live together peacefully.” The farmer says it. The pastoralist says it. The community leader says it.
And then the violence came; over land, over livestock corridors, over water; and what was once neighbourly became adversarial.
Through the implementation of the Women Livelihood Support Project, I have come to hold one conviction more firmly than ever: when people have something to lose together, they find a way to protect each other.
This is not a research paper. It is an account of what I observed, learned, and believe the development sector must do differently.
The Problem We Kept Getting Wrong
For years, the dominant response to farmer-herder conflict has followed a predictable pattern: convene a dialogue, sign a communiqué, deploy security, and wait for the next outbreak.
These interventions are not without value, but they address the symptom, not the structure.
The structure of farmer-herder conflict is fundamentally economic, and increasingly climatic. Shrinking grazing corridors, climate-induced pasture loss, and the collapse of traditional resource-sharing arrangements are the real drivers.
What I observed in the communities I worked in was the erosion of something that had once functioned: an informal but understood arrangement where herders could graze fallow land during dry seasons in exchange for naturally fertilising farmers’ plots. Neither side signed anything. But it worked, until the seasons themselves changed.
Extended dry seasons are now pushing Fulani herders further south and onto agricultural land for longer periods, breaking down those arrangements entirely. What was once a seasonal tension is becoming a year-round contest.
When a Fulani herder’s cattle destroy a Berom farmer’s crops today, it is not merely a cultural clash. It is two vulnerable people competing for survival in a system that has failed to provide enough for both, and in a climate that keeps shrinking what little there is.
You cannot talk people into peace when they are hungry and competing over the same shrinking resources. Dialogue is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Peace requires a shared stake, and climate-smart agriculture can help create it.
What We Did Differently and Why It Worked
The project was built on a simple but powerful premise: if you bring pastoralist and crop-farming women into the same economic structure (shared assets, shared goals, shared accountability) the social distance between them narrows. Trust follows function.
We did not run parallel programmes. We deliberately formed mixed cooperatives with equal representation and designed activities that required each group’s contribution to succeed. Compost production, for instance, required cattle dung from pastoralists and crop residue from farmers. Neither group could produce quality compost alone.
That practical interdependence did something that weeks of formal dialogue sometimes cannot: it made coexistence economically rational. It also reduced pressure on natural resources; when both groups could produce more from less through organic soil enrichment and drought-resistant cultivation, the zero-sum dynamic that drives violence began to loosen.
We also trained crop farmers in livestock feed formulation, so they could recognise a business opportunity in selling feed to their pastoralist neighbours. What had been a source of tension became a market transaction. Competition was converted into trade.
This is what an integrated model looks like in practice: livelihoods, climate resilience, and peacebuilding designed as a single system, not three separate workstreams. That integration is not a design luxury. In fragile settings, it is the only approach that holds.
The results were encouraging. Over 70% of trained women reported increased participation in community leadership and conflict resolution.
Three Things Every Practitioner Should Know
- Design for interdependence, not just inclusion: Including both groups in a programme is not enough. The activities themselves must require their cooperation. Shared economic assets (grinding machines, irrigation pumps, livestock feed) create ongoing interaction that sustains relationships beyond any training session.
- Economic formalisation is peace infrastructure: Registering cooperatives formally and linking them to financial service providers gives beneficiaries an institutional stake in a shared future. Our cooperatives began saving independently and generating income beyond project support. That is not just a livelihoods outcome; it is a sustainability signal for peace.
- Women are the most underutilised peacebuilding asset in fragile communities: In every community I worked in, women were already informally brokering relationships across conflict lines through trade, through marriage networks, through shared spaces. What they lacked was institutional recognition and economic agency. When we provided cooperatives, training, and financial linkages, many were invited by traditional rulers to mediate formal disputes at the palace level; unprecedented in communities where women’s voices had been historically marginalised.
A Final Word
Agriculture cannot solve political violence or fix governance failures. But it can create the conditions under which peace becomes not just desirable, but economically rational; where both the farmer and the pastoralist have something to lose if the relationship breaks down, and something to gain if it holds.
Durable peace does not begin in a communiqué. It begins in a cooperative. Not in a conference hall, but in a field, shared.
By Victor Ohikere, Programme Officer at Sahel Consulting Agriculture and Nutrition, with experience managing high-impact projects reaching over 11,000 beneficiaries and engaging stakeholders across government, private sectors, and communities