Nigeria country strategic plan (2023–2027)

CSP approved at EB February 2023 session

Revision 01 approved by the ED in April 2024

Nigeria is still to match the ambition of its commitments despite measurable progress on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Even though Nigeria graduated to lower-middle-income status in 2014, its immense human development potential remains unfulfilled, and its most vulnerable people continue to suffer critical levels of food insecurity and malnutrition, driven by persistent conflict, organized violence, recurrent climate shocks and broad exposure to the impact of climate change.

Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country has the world’s fifth-highest burden of people experiencing food crisis or worse, exceeded only by Yemen, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With at least 19.5 million people in need of urgent assistance in 2022 and some communities in the conflict-affected northeast projected to slide into catastrophic levels of food insecurity, targeted humanitarian action is urgently needed to save lives and livelihoods, requiring not only emergency responses but also anticipatory action.

Nigeria’s abundant natural resources and untapped human capital indicate the potential to achieve zero hunger, but one in three households cannot afford a nutritious diet and more than 100 million people report at least moderate food insecurity. The severity and magnitude of the regionalized crises have been compounded by the global food supply crisis, constraining Nigeria’s economic recovery from the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. WFP plans to expand its humanitarian operations in northeastern and northwestern Nigeria and among Cameroonian refugees in border states.

To meet the challenges posed by the situation, WFP will integrate its dual mandate in Nigeria through work at the humanitarian–development–peace nexus, applying targeted emergency responses that save lives while forging shock-responsive pathways to early recovery and sustainable, resilient food security, all underpinned by the integration of nutrition, gender, climate change adaptation and protection concerns into its changing-lives activities.

Framed by WFP’s strategic plan for 2022–2025 and informed by analysis, evidence, lessons learned and experience, WFP proposes a five-year country strategic plan for Nigeria, to be implemented through the pursuit of five fully integrated outcomes:

➢ Under outcome 1, to ensure that people are better able to meet their urgent food and nutrition needs, WFP will provide lifesaving, hunger-reducing support, integrated with prevention and treatment of acute malnutrition, for the people and communities most at risk during and in the aftermath of shocks, including returnees, refugees and internally displaced persons.

➢ Under outcome 2, to ensure that people have better nutrition, health and education outcomes, WFP will pursue the programmatic integration of nutrition to ensure safe year-round access to adequate nutritious food and increased resilience for the people and communities most at risk, strengthening national capacities in the prevention of all forms of malnutrition. Under this outcome, WFP will work in synergy across its portfolio, including through gender-transformative, nutrition-sensitive social and behaviour change communication.

➢ Under outcome 3, to ensure that people have improved and sustainable livelihoods, WFP will help to build community and household resilience to shocks and to open pathways to self-reliance through solutions that make food systems more productive, inclusive, equitable, environmentally sustainable, adapted to climate change and capable of delivering healthy and nutritious diets for all people. WFP will integrate malnutrition prevention activities in synergy with the provision of complementary livelihood support under outcome 1 and the provision of technical support to local and state actors under outcome 4. WFP will also extend support to smallholder farmers for enhanced food production, management and access to markets.

➢ Under outcome 4, to ensure that national programmes and systems are strengthened, WFP will apply a holistic, integrated systems approach to capacity strengthening of national and local gender- and nutrition-sensitive shock-responsive social protection systems and programmes; disaster and climate change risk reduction and mitigation that foster anticipatory action; food systems strengthening; technical assistance for national and state-level home-grown school feeding programmes; and food security and nutrition assessments and analyses (led by WFP’s critical contribution to the cadre harmonisé).

➢ Under outcome 5, to ensure that humanitarian and development actors are more efficient and effective, WFP will provide mandated and on-demand services to the humanitarian community through the WFP-managed United Nations Humanitarian Air Service and logistics sector shared services via the emergency telecommunications sector and bilateral service provision from WFP’s Nigeria country office, so that the humanitarian community is better able to reach people at risk and respond to needs and emergencies.

The strategic plan underscores the importance of interrelated and systemic programming in support of collective efforts to achieve long-term national goals. It will consolidate WFP’s role as a technical partner of choice that delivers and enables results through government programmes and augments those programmes when needs exceed national response capacities.

Over the term of the country strategic plan, keeping its focus on the 2030 horizon, the country office will seek to broaden its role and scope from an operational partner implementing food and nutrition assistance programmes to an enabling partner focused on strengthening systems.

Working jointly through the Nigeria United Nations country team and guided by the United Nations sustainable development cooperation framework for Nigeria for 2023–2027, WFP will align its programmatic approaches with national priorities and government systems, advocating the implementation of scalable, evidence-based approaches to addressing the root causes of Nigeria’s entrenched food security and nutrition challenges.