Country: Nigeria Source: Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises Please refer to the attached file. Maha Elsamahi, Alex Humphrey and Ellen ReidIntroductionA year and a half since Nigeria became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to confirm a case of Covid-19 (Adepoju, 2020), farmers and herders across the drylands are still contending with an array of shocks and stresses related to the pandemic. These include: price spikes, stock shortages, labour disruptions and low demand for outputs. Livelihood shocks are undermining the wellbeing of individual households, while also having dramatic impacts on key human development indicators at the national level. For example, one study found that during the country’s two-month period of lockdown in 2020, household incomes fell by nearly 25%, leading to a 9% increase in the country’s poverty rate (Andam et al., 2020). But critically, Covid-19 is not the only shock affecting agropastoralists in Nigeria. Numerous other challenges are interacting with the disruptive effects of the pandemic, such as incidents of farmer-herder conflict, floods and idiosyncratic shocks affecting individual households.If unmitigated, compounding shocks can have long-term, destabilising effects, with particular implications for rural livelihoods. A recent Mercy Corps report demonstrates that, in Nigeria, the pandemic has “exacerbated pre-existing conflict dynamics” by driving increased armed-group activity, which has included: “seizing property, predating on farmers, and establishing control over rural areas to carry out a variety of illicit activities” (Mercy Corps, 2021). Compounding shocks can also lead to internal displacement and international migration, particularly among agropastoral populations (Mercandalli & Losch, 2017; Ibrahim et al., 2021).Further research demonstrates the relationship between unmitigated conflict, migration and food insecurity, with particular consequences for rural communities that are often caught up in violence and most exposed to economic volatility (da Silva & Fan, 2017). All of these examples have significant implications for rural livelihoods and household resilience.Despite these long-term development risks, most formal assistance in Nigeria is not designed with the intention of building livelihood resilience in agropastoral contexts (OCHA, 2021). Further, the limited formal support for rural livelihoods that does exist is rarely designed to address the compounding nature of the risks that impact rural livelihoods. Interventions that purport to address the effects of specific shocks, in isolation from other interacting livelihood challenges, may fail to maximise impact and, at worst, may inadvertently cause harm.Nonetheless, in Nigeria, agropastoralists continue to find ways to cope and adapt their livelihoods. Understanding these strategies – as well as their limitations – is key to supporting and bolstering the resilience of agropastoralist communities to shocks and stresses; equally important is understanding the factors that facilitate these strategies. Participants in this study regularly highlighted the central role that social networks and access to informal support systems play in enabling resilience to shocks and stresses. This finding reflects a growing body of literature on linkages between household social connectedness and resilience in the context of protracted emergencies (Humphrey et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2021; Maxwell et al., 2016; Howe et al., 2018).This report begins by briefly discussing the effects of compounding shocks and stresses in agropastoral communities in Nigeria. It then presents findings on the ways in which households are coping and adapting to uncertainty and volatility, and examines the key factors that enable them to do so in light of compounding livelihood shocks. The report concludes by highlighting opportunities for aid actors to more effectively support livelihood resilience given layered and compounding shocks and stresses in Nigeria.