Browsing by Subject "Nigeria"

Background: Globally, about five million children under the age of five years old die each year, of which Nigeria accounts for roughly eight hundred and fifty thousand. Despite the alarming number of deaths, persistent financial barriers hinder immunization efforts, with a central focus on the low budgetary allocation for routine immunization, which fosters a dependence on external funding and a lack of attention to developing sustainable domestic financing strategies. Methods: I conducted a problem-driven political economy analysis to explore the interplay between political dynamics, economic considerations, and internal and external contextual factors that impact Nigeria's ability to sustainably finance vaccines beyond its partnership with Gavi. This PEA involved 14 key informant interviews across actors from national government organizations, developmental partners, and civil society organizations. Results: I found that a significant challenge in the vaccine payment pathway arose from delayed approval and release of funds. Furthermore, participants identified other central challenges to vaccine financing including the lack of prioritization by the government, limited fiscal space, and Nigeria’s adverse macroeconomic conditions such as currency devaluation and high debt financing. To tackle some of the challenges, participants reported that exhaustive stakeholder engagement, enhanced state government involvement in decision-making, excise taxes, private sector involvement via local vaccine manufacturing, and internal accountability by CSOs and private entities were some opportunities for change. Conclusions: These findings underscore the need for robust institutional processes to streamline and optimize vaccine financing mechanisms. Furthermore, comprehensive engagement and representation across all stakeholder groups are imperative to foster ownership and commitment to immunization initiatives. Addressing the identified challenges in the vaccine financing landscape would ensure the sustainability of the National Program on Immunization and drive improvements in public health outcomes.

This dissertation excavates historical fragments, moments, and broader patterns of humanitarian connection between West Germany and the wider world, and specifically to Nigeria-Biafra and Ethiopia, from the 1960s to the 1980s. It brings them together under the sign of global humanitarianism, but it does not tally them to an uplifting account or cautionary tale about humanitarianism’s rise and fall. Engaging history transnationally, beyond the Cold War, and outside the bounds of former empires, each chapter works micro-historically outward from specific places and conjunctures in order, first, to analyze the logics and effects of humanitarian aid, activism, and intervention in concrete circumstances; second, to assert West Germany’s changing placement in the postcolonial world; and third, to show how humanitarian concerns were tied to and impacted some of the key political issues of European and African history in the later twentieth century, including nationalisms and civil wars, student activisms, refugee migrations, child malnutrition, capitalist-socialist economic development, novel media forms, Holocaust memories, and new African diasporas. To define and explain the interrelation of the humanitarian and the political, this dissertation uses the concept of “moral politics.” By examining archival, visual, and oral-historical sources that shed light on West German, Nigerian-Biafran, and Ethiopian pasts from oblique angles, this dissertation pushes the study of twentieth-century global history beyond masternarratives of the Cold War and colonial imperialism. It also highlights people, ideas, and processes that defined an era when the faint futures of our present and the distant echoes of an earlier age were in dynamic tension.

This dissertation considers the production of video films by Nàgó–Yorùbá creators along Bénin’s southeastern border with Nigeria. There they find themselves at the margins of three better-funded arts industries with contrasting attitudes toward Nàgó–Yorùbá culture and aesthetics. In Nigeria, much of the Nollywood video film industry supports belonging to global religious movements, such as Pentecostal Christianity and Reformist Islam, all the while portraying indigenous religion as diabolical. The art-film scene of Bénin often dismisses West African video films as amateurish. Finally, Bénin’s state arts programs promote the Vodun religion of the coast as a tourist attraction yet deny Nàgó–Yorùbá people compensation for the state’s appropriation of their religious arts into the category of “Vodun.” Against this backdrop, video filmmakers use movies to celebrate indigenous religion and culture, to promote religious ecumenism, and to seek new sources of material support. Nevertheless, Nigerian media saturates the marketplace in Bénin so that very few local video films can earn a profit. My study thus seeks to determine how Nàgó–Yorùbá media practitioners persist in the face of such precarious conditions. I ask how the production of media becomes a forum to debate and establish norms of community and religious practice, how national identity, religious affiliation, and professional prestige affect negotiations over religious attitudes and conceptions of community, and how the open style of production in Bénin allows a diverse group of people—media professionals and others—to participate in the debates and discussions that shape media projects.

My work is based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Bénin–Nigeria border. During this time, I learned moviemaking from video filmmakers directly, acting in their productions, learning camerawork and editing, and eventually producing my own video film. I argue that Nàgó–Yorùbá video filmmakers make video movies because doing so is a community-sustaining endeavor. These efforts grant video filmmakers a prominent status in their communities as recognizable and relatable faces, and as the conveners of social activities on sets and in studios where they mingle and discuss productions with colleagues and audience members. This intimacy turns video filmmaking into what I call a production public, a group whose activities not only create media, but also negotiate the audiovisual aesthetics by which religion and culture are shown on screen. In the face of disappearing profits and intense competition, their activities are precarious, but as long as this public continues to make media, video filmmakers assume the role of moral authorities in the community while working with audiences and patrons to shape attitudes toward religious ecumenism, morality, and ethical engagement with regional and global forces. The public crafts an image of ideal community behavior that supports indigenous Nàgó–Yorùbá religion, rejects religious strife, and looks for ways to export its moral outlook to others.