Diversity, Inclusion and Efficient Disaster Risk Reduction in Nigeria: An Analytical Approach to the Intersection

Abstract

Nigeria's exposure to recurrent flooding, drought and desertification, violent extremism, farmer–herder conflict, epidemics, oil pollution and building collapse has made disaster risk reduction (DRR) an urgent governance priority. Yet the country's DRR architecture — anchored in the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) Act of 1999, the National Disaster Management Framework (2010), the National Disaster Risk Management Policy (2018) and the recently launched National Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (2025–2030) — has been slow to translate the inclusion commitments of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 into disaggregated data collection, participatory planning and differentiated response. This paper develops an analytical framework for understanding how diversity — of gender, age, disability, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic and geographic position — intersects with disaster vulnerability and response effectiveness in Nigeria. Drawing on intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), the Pressure-and-Release model of vulnerability (Wisner et al., 2004) and the Social Vulnerability Index tradition (Cutter et al., 2003), the paper synthesises institutional, humanitarian and academic evidence — including national statistics from NEMA and the National Bureau of Statistics, displacement data from the International Organization for Migration's Displacement Tracking Matrix and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and case evidence from the 2012 and 2022 floods and the North-East insurgency-displacement crisis — to argue that exclusion is not incidental to Nigerian disaster outcomes but a structural driver of them. The paper concludes that efficient DRR in Nigeria requires moving from formally inclusive policy language to operational inclusion: disaggregated risk data, representation of marginalised groups in disaster governance structures, and resourced, accountable implementation at the state and local levels.