Integrity Journal of Arts and Humanities

Conflict recurrence remains the dominant pattern of armed conflict in Africa, as relapses in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Mali show. Such recurrence signals a learning deficit: peacebuilding programmes often cannot show what has changed, for whom, under what conditions and why. Existing scholarship diagnoses this deficit but offers few integrated frameworks that track change across several dimensions of peace at once and that have been tested against African programmes. This article addresses that gap. Its objectives are to identify the structural constraints on peacebuilding monitoring and evaluation in Africa, to develop a framework that responds to them, and to assess how far Nigerian programmes capture change across its dimensions. The study is qualitative and desk-based: it synthesises theory-based evaluation, contribution analysis, complexity thinking, conflict transformation and bottom-up approaches to measuring peace, and applies the resulting framework through a structured comparison of four purposively selected Nigerian cases using triangulated secondary evidence. It identifies five constraints: attribution, timeframe mismatch, weak community ownership, multi-level complexity and indicator validity. In response, it proposes a multi-pillar framework that tracks change simultaneously across the security, governance, socio-economic, reconciliation and justice, and local ownership dimensions, anchored in an adaptive learning cycle. The cases are Operation Safe Corridor, conflict-sensitive election programming, early warning and response systems, and civil society peacebuilding in the Niger Delta. The findings show that Nigerian programmes record outputs and individual-level change with reasonable consistency but seldom capture community-level outcomes, cross-pillar interdependencies or local ownership. The article contributes an integrated, field-ready framework and concludes that credible peacebuilding evaluation in Africa requires funding cycles long enough to observe relational change, community-validated indicators, genuine local ownership and the routine use of evidence in adaptive programme management.