The Impact of Boko Haram Insurgency on the Livelihood and Food Security of Rural Households in Northeast Nigeria: A Sociological Assessment

Abstract

Rural households across Northeasterns states, Adamawa, Bauch, Borno, Gombe Taraba, and Yobe (BAY), are living through one of the most severe livelihood and food security crises in Northeast Nigeria. The nation’s recent history by March 2026, shows that 4.8 million people faced crisis-level or worse food insecurity, with lean season projections rising to 5.8 million by September, including 15,000 people in Borno State facing catastrophe level conditions. This crisis is driven substantially, though not exclusively, by a documented 2024–2026 resurgence of Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS) and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). Yet the sociological literature on Northeast Nigeria has been disproportionately centered on the insurgency itself, its origins, tactics, and counter-insurgency response, while comparatively little systematic attention has been paid to precisely how sustained violence reshapes the livelihood assets and food security of the rural households living through it, or to whether households exposed to structurally different violence patterns experience structurally different livelihood and food security outcomes. This study addresses that gap directly. Using the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, Social Capital Theory, and the FAO’s four pillars of food security as its analytical architecture. The study conducts a comparative multiple-case assessment of livelihood and food security conditions in three Local Government Areas (LGAs), Gujba (Yobe State), Madagali (Adamawa State), and Kukawa (Borno State), each exposed to a different insurgent violence signature that serves here as an explanatory rather than a central variable. Drawing on secondary data from humanitarian situation reports, conflict trackers, human rights documentation, and peer-reviewed literature (2023–2026), coded through qualitative content analysis, the study finds that all three sites exhibit convergent depletion of human, physical, natural, and financial livelihood capital, alongside compounding food security decline across the access, availability, utilization, and stability pillars, but that the specific composition of that decline, and the corresponding erosion of bonding, bridging, or linking social capital, differs systematically by violence type. The study concludes that livelihood and food security recovery programming in Northeast Nigeria must be differentiated by local conflict context rather than uniformly applied, and that the region’s severe humanitarian funding shortfall- only 1.3 percent of 2026 food assistance requirements had been received by March 2026- threatens to entrench rather than reverse these trends.