By Amy Gaman
Fatima Abba Gana was only 13 years old when conflict forced her to flee Baga in Northeast Nigeria. She trekked roughly 56 kilometres to Monguno, sometimes struggling to find food, while members of her family disappeared in the chaos. Years later, after receiving psychosocial support and learning tailoring through a humanitarian programme, she now earns an income and trains other women and girls.
In recounting her story, “From Displacement to Dignity: Fatima Abba Gana’s Journey of Resilience,” the United Nations praised Fatima for being resilient. And it is a story of resilience.
But reading it recently, I found myself thinking about everything contained inside that single word.
A childhood interrupted. A home abandoned. Family members still missing. Years spent rebuilding something that violence should never have taken away.
We have become too comfortable celebrating the resilience of people who should never have been required to endure so much in the first place.
“Resilience” is one of development’s favourite words.
A woman loses her harvest to drought and starts again: resilient. A family is displaced by conflict and rebuilds elsewhere: resilient. A young person grows up surrounded by violence but finds a livelihood: resilient. A farmer loses everything to floods, receives another set of inputs and returns to the farm: resilient.
I have used the word myself.
For over a decade, as a humanitarian and development practitioner mostly in Northeast Nigeria, I have worked with people whose ability to rebuild has humbled me.
But increasingly, I find myself asking an uncomfortable question:
At what point does celebrating resilience become an excuse for institutional failure?
I have met people who once owned hundreds of cattle, thriving businesses, homes and productive assets reduced to queuing for cooking oil, dignity kits and bags of rice.
Along the way, our language for them keeps changing. Victims become survivors. Survivors become beneficiaries. Beneficiaries become participants. Others become internally displaced persons, refugees, migrants or “populations of concern.”
The terminology becomes more sophisticated while people’s lives become smaller.
Then something remarkable happens. A man who once owned a filling station starts a tailoring business, and we celebrate his resilience. A livestock owner who once counted his cattle in hundreds receives four goats through a livelihood programme, and we document his recovery.
Starting again requires extraordinary courage. But sometimes, in our eagerness to celebrate resilience, we inadvertently diminish the scale of what people have lost.
This is not an abstract question for me.
Growing up in northern Nigeria, I wanted to become a medical doctor. But as insecurity and religious tensions spread, safety increasingly shaped choices that should have been shaped by ambition.
Schools I dreamed of attending no longer felt safe. In Maiduguri, where I studied, I lost schoolmates amid the violence surrounding the Boko Haram insurgency. I considered continuing my medical studies at the University of Jos, but recurring religious tensions and violence complicated that path too.
Eventually, my life took another direction.
I am deeply grateful for the career I have built. It has given me purpose and allowed me to work alongside extraordinary communities.
But occasionally, I still wonder: What if?
Perhaps by now I would have been a medical consultant or a neurosurgeon.
I adapted. My life moved forward. But does adapting successfully mean nothing was lost?
Perhaps this is the invisible cost of adaptation: we celebrate what people become without counting what they might have become.
That question matters far beyond my own story.
At the end of 2025, 31.7 million people were living in internal displacement across sub-Saharan Africa, almost 40 per cent of the global total. The region recorded another 17.3 million internal displacements during the year, driven primarily by persistent conflict and violence.
Nigeria offers an uncomfortable illustration. About 2.3 million people remain displaced by violence and insecurity in the Northeast, while nearly 5.8 million people there are projected to experience severe food insecurity in 2026. Nationwide, close to 35 million Nigerians face acute food insecurity. These numbers should force us to reconsider what we are asking people to be resilient against.
A shock is supposed to be exceptional, a one of event not a continuous vicious circle.
What happens when the shock becomes normal?
When a farmer rebuilds after one flood only to lose everything to another? When a displaced family returns home only to flee again? When a woman rebuilds her business after conflict but insecurity closes the market she depends upon?
Or when children survive one attack only to return to schools where abduction remains a possibility?
On 29 June, armed attackers stormed Government Day Secondary School in Lassa, Borno State, while students were sitting examinations. Around 50 people were reportedly abducted, although the exact number remained uncertain. One teacher was killed. Bishop John Bogna Bakeni of Maiduguri warned that repeated attacks were leaving children afraid that they might go to school and not return home.
A month earlier,dozens of pupils and teachers had been abducted from schools in Oyo State. After 56 days in captivity, security forces rescued them. The state subsequently committed to their medical care, psychosocial support and rehabilitation.
Their rescue deserves celebration. Their ability to recover deserves support.
But rescue is not prevention. Recovery is not protection.
And resilience should not become our explanation for why people must repeatedly survive preventable harm.
Even our governments have adopted this language. After children and adults abducted from an orphanage in Lokoja were rescued in May, the Kogi State Government commended the “strength and resilience” demonstrated by the victims and their families.
The sentiment is understandable. Surviving captivity requires extraordinary strength.
But perhaps the better measure of progress is not how resiliently people survive abduction, displacement, hunger or disaster. It is whether our institutions can prevent them from repeatedly experiencing these things at all.
To be sure, resilience matters.
Communities need the capacity to anticipate shocks, adapt and recover. Climate change alone demands stronger food systems, disaster preparedness, climate-adapted infrastructure and better financing.
And of course we would not also strip people like Fatima of the agency and courage inherent in rebuilding their own lives.
But resilience was never meant to become permission for governments, multilateral bodies and development institutions to leave people permanently responsible for surviving systemic failure.
Perhaps we are locating resilience in the wrong place.
Instead of asking only, How do we make African communities more resilient?, we should also ask:
How do we make African institutions resilient enough to protect people’s progress?
That means governments capable of preventing conflict rather than repeatedly responding to displacement. Social protection systems that intervene before families sell productive assets. Infrastructure that withstands floods.
Agricultural systems that anticipate climate shocks. Security institutions people trust. Economies capable of creating opportunities before desperation becomes vulnerability.
It also requires development organisations to reconsider what recovery means.
Restoring someone to subsistence after they once lived securely is not transformation.
Survival is not prosperity.
Coping is not development.
And repeatedly starting again should not become an African development strategy.
Africa does not have a shortage of resilient people. I have spent much of my life among them. I may even be one of them.
But perhaps we have spent too much time strengthening people’s capacity to survive broken systems and too little time asking why those systems keep breaking them.
Africa does not need to prove that its people can endure more.
It needs institutions strong enough that they no longer have to.
*Amy Gaman is a Public Voices Fellow Tackling Poverty, a partnership between Acumen and The OpEd Project
