In recent years, Nigeria has seen a surge in the number of internally displaced persons especially in the northern part of the country. While the affected population have one thing in common - being internally displaced and vulnerable, they may have dissimilar characteristics in terms of demographic and geographic distribution and very importantly reasons for their placement. I believe that a better understanding of these is necessary for all stakeholders involved in delivering humanitarian services to the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and most importantly to all the tiers of the national government.
Having set the general context of this discourse, the specific context is the North West and North Central zones of Nigeria.
The objective of this analysis is to glean some insight about the IDPs in the North West and North Central zones of Nigeria by asking some specific questions and seeking answers using a dataset collected by the United Nations International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
Nigeria consists of six(6) geopolitical zones. The scope of this analysis is limited to the two zones mentioned earlier as those were the only zones covered in the dataset provided.
a. What is the population of the reported IDPs?
b. Is the size of the population significantly different between the zones?
How is the distribution of IDP sites across Local Government Areas (LGAs) within the states?
What is the gender distribution in the IDPs across the states?
What can the states focus on to stop or reduce the chances of people getting displaced?
Nigeria Displacement Data - North Central & West Zones - Location Assessment
International Organisation for Migration (IOM) The dataset cover the period of 4 September - 16 October 2019 and includes the states mostly affected by displacement including Benue,Nasarawa and Plateau in North Central; Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto and Zamfara in North West.
The provided dataset was provided in structured and already cleaned requiring no standard preprocessing before analysis.
- NGN IDPs Analysis.ipynb : This is the notebook file containing the source code and some documentation
- idp_data_2.xlsx : This file contains the entire dataset used for this analysis
IDPs when present in a state tend to be dispersed across LGAs, women tend to make up more of the IDP population, and communal clashes is the leading reason for displacement in the two zones considered and this is also true in some states.
Full details about this analysis is available at: https://medium.com/@codeyans/internal-displacement-in-north-west-central-nigeria-b313c939b3b5