Household assessment in post conflict situations: strategies, challenges and results: a case study of north east zone, Nigeria

Insurgency activities have led to socio-economic and infrastructural challenges and almost total collapse in the Northeast, Nigeria. Prior to Boko Haram insurgency, most people in the Northeast were involved in agricultural and socio-economic activities. However, the negative effect of insurgency led to displacement of over three million inhabitants, reducing them to refugees with adverse effects on their livelihoods. But with relative peace being restored in most affected communities, displaced people are leaving IDPs camps for their communities. The non-governmental organizations through funding from donor agencies came up with different interventions to bring reliefs to the affected host communities and returnees; however, this cannot be done without appropriate identification of the target audience for the intervention. Therefore, the study aims to explore appropriate methodology in post conflict situation to identify most vulnerable farmers per house hold in the host communities with minimal bias. Purposive cluster sampling was adopted in selecting most affected states with a sample size of 11,000; while Registered Cooperative Associations and Household Targeted Committee (HTC) strategies were explored to determine a better strategy that will produce minimal bias in registration of the households. Through systematic review of 360 Cooperative Farmers’ Associations registers, it was observed that over 65% of the members are not vulnerable and 48%of them not residing in the communities, 15% household members duplicated, while20% are vulnerable. The Household Targeted Committee (HTC) strategy that enhanced community participation, ownership and sustainability of project produced results close to 100% vulnerable farmers (11,896) with minimal bias. Therefore, in post conflict situation household assessment, mixture of research methods and HTC strategy is thus recommended.