Listening to 10,000 voices: From data to policy decision in the Lake Chad Basin

The Lake Chad Basin represents everything that makes development work both urgent and extraordinarily difficult. Four countries, 49 million people dependent on the basin's natural resources, ongoing conflict, climate change, and displacement—all converging in a region caught between the Sahel's instability and Central Africa's fragility.

Add to this the complexity of bridging Francophone (Cameroon, Chad, Niger) and Anglophone (Cameroon and Nigeria) systems, navigating regional political tensions, and creating evidence that all states in the region can trust equally.

The World Bank commissioned NIRAS to design and implement a comprehensive perception survey system for the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC)—a regional body bringing together Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. The goal? To create a sustainable knowledge management platform that would provide all member states with reliable, comparable data on security, governance, climate impacts, and community needs across their shared border regions. This required not just collecting data, but building a methodology so rigorous that no member state could question its validity.

The approach for the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) addresses this challenge through methodological innovation. Rather than conducting isolated surveys, the project establishes a real-time evidence ecosystem that adapts to conflict dynamics while maintaining research rigor across all regional governments-addressing the fragmented evidence bases that often allow member states to selectively interpret data according to their preferred positions.

Building trust through methodological rigour

Beyond the operational challenges of working in conflict zones, this project tackles an equally complex political challenge: creating evidence that transcends regional divides in a basin where several major African crises converges.

Our solution was methodological standardisation so rigorous that the data becomes incontestable. The same survey instrument translated into local languages across all four countries. Identical sampling methodologies. Simultaneous data collection windows. Real-time quality control protocols ensuring comparability. The technological backbone proved equally crucial—geolocation data for every survey point and a digital dashboard allowing real-time monitoring of data collection progress across all four countries.

The success was largely due to the LCBC partnership, which played a fundamental role by co-constructing survey tools, monitoring field challenges in real time, and collaboratively solving problems when security constraints required rapid adaptation. Rather than a traditional client─consultant relationship, this became genuine co-production of knowledge with a regional institution that will ultimately use and act on these insights.

What phase 1 revealed: key findings

The scale of our operation—nearly 10,000 respondents and 1,000 focus group participants during February-March 2023—delivered insights that fundamentally challenge conventional assumptions about the Lake Chad Basin.

Our respondents—5,107 women and 4,591 men with an average age of 38—paint a portrait of border communities that defies easy categorisation. While 75% are married with 4-5 children, 68% lack formal schooling, highlighting profound educational gaps that shape regional development challenges.

While the surveys were conducted in all four countries, the findings from Nigeria and Niger in particular offer a vivid snapshot of the intersecting challenges that shape daily life in these fragile border regions.

Nearly 70% of Nigerian respondents were aware of violent incidents in their localities—yet this tells only part of the story. While administrative authorities maintain only around 30% physical presence (in the form of local elected officials, governors, prefets, police/gendarmerie forces and the like) across Niger, Nigeria, and Chad border areas, traditional and customary chiefs maintain over 90% presence across all four countries.

While 86% of respondents in Niger personally know people displaced by disasters—a figure that illuminates why climate migration has become central to regional instability—displacement patterns differ significantly across the basin, requiring tailored policy responses rather than one-size-fits-all regional approaches.

These challenges do not exist in isolation: insecurity compounds a lack of access to basic services, weak state presence amplifies vulnerability to both endogenous and exogenous shocks, and climate change intensifies all existing fragilities—creating a cumulative burden that defines daily life in border communities.

Why this work matters for regional development

Conflict, climate vulnerability, and development challenges are not limited to borders. The Lake Chad Basin's interconnected crises—from Boko Haram's cross-border operations to climate-induced migration flows—require responses that match their regional scale. Working with the LCBC and the World Bank means embracing these constraints and operating at the most appropriate institutional level.

To have a sustainable solution, the cooperation of all concerned states is necessary. Despite differences and disagreements between LCBC member states, NIRAS’ MEL&Peace approach works to serve exactly this purpose: creating data as ground rules, starting points, and foundations for discussion and action. Through the identical governance findings, or the same climate displacement patterns, government officials will be able to observe the data that will become  the neutral foundation for regional programming transcending national politics.

The approach here differs from typical MEL assignments in that its focus is on building a sustainable Knowledge Management Platform that will guide future regional policies. The LCBC now possesses shared intelligence that no single member state controls or can question on methodological grounds.

Building on solid foundations

As we prepare to launch the second cycle of surveys, the NIRAS MEL&Peace team is transcending the traditional limitations of baseline studies that remain isolated snapshots. Phase 2 of this assignment represents a fundamental shift from baseline establishment to longitudinal analysis, which will show how interventions impact communities over time.

Enable real change measurement: By maintaining identical methodologies, we can track genuine shifts in community perceptions, governance effectiveness, and social cohesion indicators across the four-country region.

Deepen regional stability analysis: Phase 2 will identify emerging tension points before they escalate into crises. Our early warning capacity—built on community-level perception changes—provides decision-makers with predictive rather than reactive intelligence.

The strategic importance cannot be overstated. As climate change, conflict, and displacement continue reshaping the Sahel, the longitudinal data NIRAS is developing provides both early warning signals for emerging crises and evidence of what works in community-centered programming.

The experience illustrates how shared evidence bases can transcend political divides when methodological rigour combines with collaborative knowledge production—particularly when development interventions operate at the scale that corresponds to the challenges they aim to address. As Phase 2 begins, this collaborative foundation with the LCBC becomes even more critical for generating longitudinal insights that can inform genuine regional programming rather than fragmented national interventions.