All 4 entries tagged Displacement

Data–based humanitarianism in Nigeria and South Sudan

Source: Data and Displacement Project Fieldwork

Written by: Funke Fayehun, Briony Jones, Leben Moro and Vicki Squire

This blog from members of the Data and Displacement team explores barriers that emerge in the context of data-driven approaches to humanitarian protection.ⁱ

How far can a data-driven approach to humanitarian protection foster increased participation and improved outcomes for IDPs? We address this question based on an analysis of interviews with displaced persons (IDPs) and stakeholders in Northeastern Nigeria and South Sudan. Our findings highlight the ways that the production and use of data in itself generates challenges for the participation of affected communities, with protection outcomes compromised by a range of contextual, specific and systemic barriers.

Northeastern Nigeria and South Sudan

Northeastern Nigeria has seen terrorism and armed conflict over a number of years, including insurgencies by the Boko Haram sect in the 1990s, later allied with the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). This has led to deaths, the loss of livelihood and key support systems, and multiple displacements. Findings from our research suggest that there are lapses in the data ecosystems in Nigeria, with likely consequences of imprecise and inaccurate data on humanitarian assistance and planning.

South Sudan gained independence on 9 July 2011, enabling the return of millions of displaced persons. However, due to the outbreak of civil war in 2013, ongoing political battles and intense violence, largely along ethnic lines, has caused catastrophic repercussions for civilians. As of 2021, 2.34 million South Sudanese were refugees in neighboring countries while another 1.615 million were IDPs. Despite resolution in 2018, our research indicates that the generation and management of data on IDPs in the country have significant shortcomings.

Exploring the Challenges:

1. Technological and infrastructural barriers

In Northeastern Nigeria, there are both personnel and equipment gaps, which limit capacities for data collection and storage. The lack of equipment and well-trained personnel limits the coherence of data storage and handling processes, which differ across organizations. Divergent data banks across institutions and actors, along with reliability and systematisation issues in some cases, mean that there is a multiplicity of data.

Most South Sudanese NGOs do not generate sufficient and reliable financial resources by which to acquire the necessary expertise and material resources. UN agencies and international organisations are better positioned to acquire and deploy the required capacity to generate and manage data. Representatives of international organisations that we interviewed confirmed use of tablets to undertake headcounts and profiling for returns.

2. Procedural and Administrative barriers in defining vulnerability

Both stakeholders and IDPs highlight irregularities in the classification and identification of the most vulnerable IDPs in camps in Northeastern Nigeria. Many ‘fall through the cracks’ of protection because classification issues both at the point of registration and within the data subsequently collected for planning purposes lead to many needing help being overlooked.

While some stakeholders in South Sudan are involved in projects targeting vulnerable groups as well as general protection needs, many IDPs who we interviewed in camps suggest that the needs of some vulnerable people are not addressed. Those likely to ‘fall through the cracks’ of protection are victims of sexual violence, which is a significant but culturally sensitive issue in South Sudan.

3. Ethical barriers

There is an inconsistent and inappropriate ethical system for data collection from IDPs in Northeastern Nigeria. Many IDPs describe consent as verbal, without proper recording or written documentation and with limited information. In some instances, data collectors do not directly obtain consent from IDPs, but instead, go ahead with data collection after stating the purpose and approval from higher authorities.

In South Sudan some IDPs interviewed for this study expressed distrust or fear about people coming to collect data from them. Some IDPs agreed to give consent because their community leaders agreed to the data collection, and some complain that those who collect data from them do not return and fail to provide feedback.

4. Systemic barriers

Technological innovations intersect with donor pressure, donor agendas, and our research highlights the role of inter-agency competition over finite resources and funding. Data-driven humanitarian assistance is clearly a contested terrain with implications for IDP participation and humanitarian outcomes. Our research indicates that IDPs often have different understandings to humanitarian practitioners of the value of sharing data and expectations of what it should be used for. One told us:

‘I did not ask them. I would want to ask them, but I did not, they came to collect data like you are doing now, but they disappeared’

Conclusion

In reviewing data-driven humanitarian assistance in IDP camps in Northeastern Nigeria and South Sudan, our research points to a range of barriers to improving protection outcomes: technological and infrastructural, procedural and administrative, as well as ethical. Our findings suggest that this requires further investment in personnel and technological infrastructure, more careful attention to classification processes in the identification of vulnerability and need, plus improved ethical practices that take informed consent seriously.

Profile of Authors:

Funke Fayehun, Associate Professor and Head of Department of Sociology, University of Ibadan

Briony Jones, Reader of International Development, Politics and International Studies Department, University of Warwick.

Leben Moro, Director of the Directorate of Scientific and Cultural External Relations, University of Juba.

Vicki Squire, Professor of International Studies, Politics and International Studies Department, University of Warwick.

Notes:

[i] Data and Displacement: Assessing the Practical and Ethical Implications of Targetting Humanitarian Protection is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (AHRC-FCDO) Collaborative Humanitarian Protection Programme (grant AH/T007516/1). We would like to thank the wider research team for their work on this project, including João Porto de Albuquerque, Dallal Stevens, Rob Trigwell, Ọláyínká Àkànle, Modesta Alozie, Kuyang Harriet Logo, Prithvi Hirani, Grant Tregonning, Stephanie Whitehead, HajjaKaka Alhaji Mai, Abubakar Adam, Omolara Popoola, Silvia De Michelis, Ewajesu Opeyemi Okewumi, Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez, Funke Caroline Williams and Oluwafunto Abimbola. The project team undertook a total of 140 semi-structured qualitative interviews in Northeastern Nigeria and South Sudan, 100 with IDPs and 40 with practitioners, split equally across the two locations. The team has also conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with a total of 42 humanitarians who have expertise in data and information management, from across a range of international organisations and NGOs. We would also like to extend our thanks to Annika Sirikulthada, a University of Warwick Research Assistant who suported preparation of the blog.

Mouzayian Khalil : 15 Dec 2022 15:27 |  Tags: Data-Driven Approach Displacement Humanitarianism Migration Nigeria South Sudan |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Let us Talk about Young Men and their Participation in the Niger Delta Violence

Pollution in the Niger Delta (courtesy: Stakeholder Development Network SDN)

Written by Dr Modesta Alozie

Anjo limped as he walks towards me for an interview, I wondered what had happened to his leg. He had been shot in 2003 in Bayelsa during a violent clash between the military and the local youths, many of whom were men. For months, local youths sabotaged oil pipelines in the region and kidnapped oil company staff for ransom, which led the federal government to send in the military to repress dissidents. Although the National Youth Policy (2019) says the age range of youth in Nigeria as 18-29 years, it is not unusual in the Niger delta to find people as old as 45 years old identify as youths. This is because youth, in this context, is mainly a site of marginalisation and contestation rather than an age category.

The violence was not only happening in Bayelsa but across the other eight states of the Niger delta where Nigeria’s oil production takes place, with a huge consequence for the development of the region. Thousands of people have died and thousands have been displaced. Properties have been destroyed, and between 2007-2008, Nigeria’s oil production decreased by 40%. In a country where 88% of the government earning comes from oil, the economic effect of this violence cannot be understated. Peace was eventually restored in 2009 after the government introduced the Amnesty Programme which promised monthly stipends to the youths if they dropped their arms. But sporadic violence still occurs.

Because Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil exporter, the violence in the Niger delta has huge implications for global oil supply. As such, there is serious interest from academics as well as the media to explain this violence. Economists like Paul Collier tell us that what fuels this violence is greed by young men, and in the media, these young men have been labelled as criminals. Blaming young men for this violence leads to the stigmatisation of young people in the society and obscures the role of the state as well as the oil companies in creating the inequalities that fuel this violence in the first place.

In my doctoral research, I sought to explain this violence from the perspectives of these young men. I spoke with these young men and observed their social environment to understand how their identity as men influence their violent behaviour. Many of the youths I spoke to blame the government and the oil companies, who are in a joint business arrangement with the federal government, for this violence. When Nigeria’s oil revenue surged in the 1970s, the federal government introduced new economic and political structures to monopolise control over oil proceeds. First, a Federation Account was created into which all oil revenues are channelled to be shared subsequently across all the states in the country. Then, the Derivation Principle which regulates the proportion of internally generated revenue to be retained by any state was slashed from 50% to 3% in the 1980s. At the moment, the oil communities retain 13% of the oil profits generated within their region as specified by the Derivation Principle and population size is considered the most important criteria for sharing the revenue collected by the federal government. As such, the majority ethnic groups, especially the Hausa Northerners, have received the largest chunk of the oil proceeds due to their large number. The oil communities see this as distributive injustice. There is a perception amongst the oil communities that their ethnic minority status makes it difficult for them to negotiate a better revenue-sharing arrangement at the federal government level.

Corrupt practices by local politicians and harmful corporate practices by the oil companies further compound the problems of the oil communities. A large chunk of the funds which could have been invested in development projects, such as employment creation is diverted into private pockets, and so the level of unemployment in the region is very high. For decades, oil spills have occurred frequently in the Niger delta often without remediation and compensation to the oil communities. Between 1976-2001, 7000 oil spill incidents occurred in the Niger delta and every year, 240,000 barrels of oil are spilt in the Niger region. This is the highest rate of oil spills recorded anywhere in the world leading the BBC to name the Niger delta ‘the world oil pollution capital’.

Oil spills in the Niger delta occur mainly from operational failures or pipeline vandalisation by youths. By law, the local communities are supposed to be compensated by the oil firms when an oil spill happens due to operational failures. However, compensation rarely happens because the Joint Investigation process (JIV) which is used to determine the cause of an oil spill is seriously flawed. The oil companies provide the equipment and finances required for the JIV, which leaves little room for accountability and transparency in the process. As such, the oil communities believe that most oil spill data from the JIV is unreliable.

In many instances when local residents have gone to the court to challenge the outcome of the JIV, they have been unsuccessful, although a recent court case in which four local farmers won an oil spill case against Shell in a Dutch court brings some glimmer of hope. Because rural livelihood in the Niger Delta is predominantly fishing and farming, local people have watched their future drain away with oil and concern for health continues to rise. It is within this context of exclusion and pollution that young men like Anjo are challenging the oil companies and the institutional structures which they believe do not serve them.

My research found that while women also experience the economic exclusion resulting from oil exploration, men are disproportionately affected by the social consequences of this economic exclusion. Also, some traditional ideas of manhood encourage violent behaviour amongst Ijaw men. Egbesu, the Ijaw god of war commands young men to rise as men and protect their communities against any external danger and injustice. This cultural context normalises violence to a certain extent and many young men who are socialised in this context see the enactment violence as merely a habitualised way of being a male member of the Ijaw community.

Young men in the Niger Delta are expected to provide for their households as well as to marry, but in the Niger Delta, marriage is a long and elaborate process requiring large sums of cash. Without getting married, many young men remain in limbo as junior men and they are not able to participate meaningfully in local community life. Many young men I spoke to saw marriage and the provider role as essential to who they are as men. They explain how unemployment undermines their ability to perform these roles as well as how violence enables them to meet these social roles.

During my interview with Anjo, he explained that before joining violent militancy, he had no money to pay his children’s school fees and to feed his family as a man, which led to regular insults from his wife. After joining one of the well-known militant gangs in the region, Anjo’s economic situation improved significantly. He and his peers were paid hugely by the oil companies to protect oil territories. Consequently, Anjo received enough money to provide for both his immediate as well as extended family.

Many Ijaw men I spoke to justified violence as a normal way of being a good man in the Ijaw community and in a context characterised by injustice. The dependence on Ijaw men’s strength for community protection shifts the responsibility of resistance against military repression and exclusion on young men, who then use violence to resist an equally violent state.

While many unemployed men struggled to become providers and to marry, I observed in the night clubs and in wedding ceremonies that violent men lived a different life. In the clubs, women wanted them for their cash, and in the wedding ceremonies they were invited as ‘Chairmen’, an honourable Nigerian title almost exclusively reserved for older rich men. In this context of exclusion, violence offered young men an opportunity to insert themselves into the mainstream social and economic life, albeit through the back door.

Since young men are the main perpetrators and victims of this violence, addressing this violence and achieving inclusive development in the Niger delta requires that intervention strategies meet the diverse needs of young men (and women) many of whom live at the margins of the oil communities. Finally, it is time to move towards a society where men are humanised and manhood is not linked with violence.

Author Bio

Dr Modesta Alozie is the Lead Research Fellow on the Data and Displacement Project at the Department of Politics and International Relations University of Warwick, UK. She holds a PhD in Development Planning from University College London. Before joining Warwick, Modesta worked as a research consultant at the Urban Institute University of Sheffield in the LO-ACT low carbon project. Her research has focused on climate change and analysing the complex impacts of oil extraction in Nigeria from an intersectional perspective. Recently, her research has expanded geographically beyond Nigeria to include South Sudan focusing on the experiences of internally displaced people in these two contexts.

Mouzayian Khalil : 26 Feb 2021 11:27 |  Tags: Conflict Displacement Gender Inclusion Niger Delta Youth Violence |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

Photo Credit: Knut Bry/Tinagent

Written by: Henrik Kjellmo Larsen & Eleanor Gordon

A Policy of Silence?

After the fire that destroyed the Moria Reception and Identification Centre on the Greek island of Lesvos, on 08 September, the 13,000 migrant-residents were moved into a quickly assembled new camp in Kara Tepe. Within a month this camp was already being referred to as ‘worse than Moria’, which had itself been described as ‘hell on earth’.

After the fire, European Commission (EC) Home Affairs Commissioner, Ylva Johanson, said there would be ‘no more Morias’, recognising that the poor conditions were partly responsible for the developments which led to the fire.

Whether or not conditions in the camp would improve and the Commissioner’s assurances honoured will now be difficult to ascertain in light of a recent General Operation Regulation of the Temporary Reception Facilities in Greece passed on 30 November. This regulation prohibits all workers operating in a refugee camp, including government civil servants and volunteers, from publicly sharing any information about the residents or the conditions in the new camp. Kara Tepe is thus continuing a dangerous trend of hiding harm with a policy of silence.

‘Living Hell’

Moria was designated a ‘hotspot’ due to the overwhelming surge of migrants arriving on Lesvos in 2015. The ‘hotspot approach’ was intended to allow for a quicker Registration and adjudicate of asylum application and provide additional support to ensure dignified shelters and services.

However, when the EU-Turkey statement was signed in 2016, the vastly understaffed Greek asylum service meant asylum claims could not be processed quickly enough. The camp became a bottleneck, severely and perpetually overcrowded, with the 3,000-person capacity far exceeded by up to 20,000 people.

As a consequence, Moria, built as a short term transit camp but without even meeting the UNHCR standards of a transit camp, essentially became a camp for long-term residency where many migrants effectively remained trapped in deplorable conditions for months and sometimes years. Some described the camp as ‘the worst refugee camp on earth’, as ‘a living hell’, and a prisonlike place where the lack of food, poor sanitation, limited water and electricity supply and prevalent violence, earned the camp a reputation of being ‘the moral failure of Europe’. These deplorable camp conditions contributed to a number of fires in the camp, including the fire which destroyed the camp, resulting from technical faults and growing desperation among migrant residents.

Over a period of 18 months, we, two scholars, one of whom has extensive field experience from Lesvos, conducted interviews with humanitarian actors working in Moria on the causes and effects of these poor camp conditions. Invariably, research participants described the conditions as deplorable, and as intended to both deter humanitarian actors and, moreover, prospective migrants hoping to enter the EU. Many were also critical of how information about these conditions was being carefully managed in order to avoid public scrutiny.

Information Control

Humanitarian actors described being prevented from taking photos or video footage in and around the camp by the police: ‘If they get your camera, they delete everything’. This could be an indication of a desire to hide what is going on in Moria, and in so doing to keep it away from media scrutiny.

A number of humanitarian actors also regarded the recent, high-profile arrest of Salam Aldeen, a prominent NGO manager in the field, because he shared pictures and information and was an unrelenting critic of the terrible camp conditions and the treatment of migrants. His arrest was regarded by other humanitarian actors as intended to silence those seeking to document and share what they perceived to be wrongdoing by the Greek authorities. Many also regarded his arrest and the broader practice of policing humanitarian aid workers as intended to deter other volunteers from offering humanitarian assistance.

Humanitarian actors also said that when official visitors came, they would only be shown a small part of the camp, and only after it had been cleared and cleaned. These visits, during which journalists are not allowed in, were effectively staged to present the camp in a very particular way to avoid criticism and public scrutiny. However, a difficult balance needed to be maintained between avoiding criticism, while maintaining the spectre of deterrence by ensuring the message was communicated to migrant groups particularly, as well as to domestic groups hostile to migration, about the poor conditions. As one of our research participants (a humanitarian volunteer working in the camp) said in 2019:

They don’t want to keep the camp so bad so that Greece reputation is completely ruined. When Angelina Jolie and the pope visited, they cleaned up the camp a little bit. Journalists are not let in… They don’t want to show the worst part of the camp, but they want to make sure it’s bad enough to not want to come.

Official communication thus becomes a balancing act between presenting a powerful show of deterrence for migrants, as well as those who might want to help them, and evading criticism for failing to meet the international humanitarian standards. This difficult balance is maintained by limiting disseminated information and keeping audiences separate. Paradoxically, the less that is actually known about Moria, the more these dual messages are able to be managed: criticisms can be avoided, and the spectre of detention is all the more powerful because of the element of the unknown.

Photo Credit: Knut Bry/Tinagent

The Camp as Carceral Space

Prisons also perform this balancing act of communicating different messages to different audiences, and similarly do so by controlling and limiting information that is disseminated.

It is no coincidence that Moria has been referred to repeatedly by our research participants as ‘prison-like’. This is not just because it looked like a prison with its perimeter fences, barbed wire and gates, checkpoints and police guards. Nor is it just because the camp became a space of indefinite confinement. It is also because residents were segregated, contained and screened from outside communities, their movements strictly controlled and curtailed, and information about them tightly controlled.

Carefully managing information about groups in carceral spaces – through segregation, containment and curtailing communication channels – also helps protect the presentation of these groups as deviant and in need of control and punishment. Their continued segregation and containment, in often deplorable conditions, can thus be justified.

In effect, rendering migrants invisible enables a discourse to be constructed and maintained around the migrant left relatively unchallenged by a lack of evidence to the contrary. Segregation and control of information about migrants and how they suffer is also an effective governing technique, helping to dehumanise, facilitate indifference towards them and reduce acts of solidarity.

Hiding the Harm

With the policy of silence being legislated in Greece, under the General Operation Regulation, the Greek government is authorising an environment where the suffering of migrant remains unseen hidden from society. When suffering cannot be seen, when it is confined behind prison-like barriers, and when it is kept from public scrutiny by destroying camera footage, it is easier to dehumanise and to deny that human rights violations and other harms have occurred.

Efforts to hide the suffering enables dehumanisation and reduces the migrant to a number it enables them to be presented as someone who represents a danger, rather than someone who’s in danger.

In turn, this justifies entrapping migrants in deplorable camp conditions and, paradoxically, helps justify disinterest in the harms they suffered, thus allowing harms to continue under the shroud of silence.

Reference:

Gordon, E. and Larsen, H.K. (2020) ‘Sea of Blood’: The Intended and Unintended Effects of the Criminalisation of Humanitarian Volunteers Rescuing Migrants in Distress at Sea’, Disasters. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/disa.12472.

About the Authors:

Henrik Kjellmo Larsenis a PhD candidate in The School of Social Science at Monash University. He spent four months as a field coordinator doing search and rescue on Lesvos in 2015 and has spent the last six years working in the field of criminalisation of humanitarian workers, security, global governance and human rights. His research, practise and field work focus on violent borderwork, human rights and mental health of emergent groups and spontaneous volunteers in disaster areas.

Eleanor Gordonis a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Development at Monash University. She spent 20 years working in the field of conflict, security, justice and human rights, including 10 years working in conflict-affected environments with the UN and other international organisations. Her research, teaching and practice focuses on inclusive approaches to building security and justice after conflict.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6865-6562

Mouzayian Khalil : 26 Jan 2021 10:10 |  Tags: Displacement Humanitarian Crises Migrants Moria |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem