Five Ways OTI Addresses Violent Extremism in West Africa: Local Solutions from Lessons Learned across the Region

In 2024, OTI turns 30. To celebrate this anniversary, we are looking back on the lessons we have learned from more than 80 high-impact programs that have advanced U.S. interests worldwide.

For 30 years, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) has partnered with local communities, civil society, and government institutions to implement programs that promote peace, stability, and accountable democratic governance. Particularly in West Africa, OTI understands that investing in local systems is key to preventing and countering violent extremism (CVE) and supporting stability in a priority region for U.S. interests. Below are five lessons OTI has learned from engaging in this work.

1. Prevention Requires Awareness 

Violent extremist organizations (VEOs) and their tactics are not always easy to spot. People may be asked to surveil government targets or smuggle goods across borders without realizing they are acting on behalf of a VEO. Raising awareness is vital to a community’s ability to identify and resist these tactics. 

Typical government responses to violent extremist threats like movement restrictions and increased military presence often lead to suspicion, economic hardship, and resentful communities. OTI’s Coastal West Africa program, which supports local counterparts across Benin, Ghana, and Togo, found that training local leaders, community members, and authorities on violent extremist tactics and the importance of community engagement is more effective. This type of training emphasizes the importance of community protection and leads to better communication and a shared vision for community resilience. Because when people understand the threats, they can guard against them—and take preventative action.

2. You Can’t Eat Peace

Young West Africans lament “you can’t eat peace,” citing jobs and economic opportunity, not security, as their top concerns. VEOs know this and use it to target youth for recruitment. If CVE activities do not also address local economic needs, their impact will be limited. An effective way to address this is to incorporate economic alternatives into CVE-related dialogues and training. However, jobs alone do not prevent violent extremism recruitment—state presence is also required to strengthen community resilience. Improving local government services, such as issuing legal IDs and enabling reliable access to markets, enhances employment opportunities and serves as an effective hook for attracting youth participation.

3. Emphasize Personal Security

While everyone is vulnerable to VEO tactics, moto-taxi drivers and market vendors in West Africa are particularly vulnerable. Transporters’ frequent cross-border movement and low awareness of VEO tactics means they often unwittingly help VEOs bypass police and border checks. Local vendors do not trust authorities, so they often withhold suspicious information about VEO activity. 

OTI and local partners found drivers and vendors were willing to change these practices, and share information with authorities, when the benefit to their personal security was emphasized. Activities such as locally-led awareness campaigns and personal security trainings brought local officials together with moto-taxi drivers and vendors, giving them a platform to listen, build relationships, air grievances, and reduce mistrust.

4. Conflict Mitigation is Key

OTI has found that strengthening conflict resolution systems and securing community buy-in helps prevent VEOs from weaponizing local disputes. Across West Africa, OTI trained hundreds of people on conflict mediation techniques, which has encouraged communities to create their own local mediation committees. Since 2021, 64 percent of conflicts in the communities where OTI works have been resolved through mediation or dialogue, despite rising food insecurity, water scarcity, and insurgency. This is compared to a mediation rate of only 17 percent in communities that have not had an OTI presence. Significantly, farmer-herder conflicts—long considered intractable—have dropped dramatically in Niger and Ghana in communities where OTI first conducted conflict mediation training. In the past, these local disputes would have resulted in violence, creating an opening for VEOs to exploit.

5. Change the Rhetoric

Addressing violent extremism also means paying attention to how communities react to and use language to describe the threat. Across West Africa, VEOs are increasingly turning to local criminal networks and auxiliary gangs to pursue their goals, making VE affiliation harder to spot and terminology like “de-radicalization” and “countering violent extremism” less resonant with communities. Talking about “stability” and “peacebuilding” can be more effective.

In Niger for example, focusing on “stability” instead of “terrorism” aligned with the interests of local authorities and resulted in better community engagement than when support was framed as CVE. Addressing “stability” through programming also helped incorporate other problems that overlap with VEO activities but are difficult for OTI to address directly, such as smuggling, trafficking, and poaching. 

As OTI celebrates its 30th year, these takeaways from West Africa remind us that the office’s efforts in more than 40 conflict-affected countries are an iterative process. OTI’s strength is not only found in its fast, flexible, and responsive model, but in its willingness to step back, reflect, and learn from the thousands of activities implemented over more than a quarter century of programming. This approach is critical now more than ever as we face a world of ever-evolving complex problems with no known solutions. Looking ahead to the next 30 years, as OTI continues its mission to foster stability and resilience across the globe, the lessons learned in West Africa serve as a powerful reminder that local solutions, grounded in community engagement and adaptive strategies, are essential in the fight against violent extremism.