By Omonon Chidi-Nwafor
Nigeria spends billions annually responding to crises—floods, health emergencies, drug-related crime, unemployment, and climate shocks. Yet much of this expenditure addresses consequences rather than causes.
Across the Reframing Resilience series, we have explored the structural vulnerabilities facing Nigeria’s youth: climate stress, health pressures, substance use, social dislocation, and exclusion from national problem-solving systems. Now, in this final edition, the question is unavoidable: who pays for prevention, and how can investment in youth resilience save Nigeria both money and lives?
Prevention is often portrayed as a moral obligation or a social good. In reality, it is the most economically rational approach to national resilience. Every naira invested in youth-centered prevention today offsets far greater costs tomorrow—emergency healthcare, rehabilitation, law enforcement, disaster recovery, and lost productivity all rise sharply when prevention fails. Financing resilience is therefore not philanthropy; it is deferred crisis spending brought forward at a discount.
The challenge, however, is systemic. Prevention rarely secures funding because savings are diffuse, accruing across multiple ministries, agencies, and social systems. Ministries of Health, Youth, Environment, Finance, and Justice all see only part of the picture. As a result, programs designed to reduce drug abuse, mental health crises, or climate vulnerability among youth compete for attention against visible emergency expenditures. They remain underfunded, fragmented, or relegated to pilots that never scale.
A solution requires reframing prevention as infrastructure. Just as Nigeria invests in roads, power, and telecommunications to keep the economy moving, it must invest in systems that keep social, health, and climate shocks from escalating.
This means embedding young people into governance structures where they can actively gather environmental and health data, participate in early-warning and intervention systems, and support community-level prevention. When youth are positioned as distributed risk sensors, they generate both social value and economic return.
Institutions such as the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) are central to this model. Traditionally focused on enforcement and regulation, these agencies are now increasingly recognizing that prevention is inseparable from enforcement.
Climate-driven displacement, rising unemployment, and stress-induced vulnerability are amplifying substance use among youth. Prevention programs that integrate local data, community engagement, and education reduce the burden on law enforcement while strengthening societal resilience.
Civil society platforms also play a critical role.
The FLAG Foundation of Nigeria, for instance, leverages values-based youth mobilization, patriotism, and mentorship networks to complement state interventions. When young people are empowered to act through trusted platforms, prevention becomes a shared enterprise: not top-down control, but locally anchored, participatory resilience.
Financing such systems requires both imagination and realism. Climate funds, health system strengthening budgets, and security allocations can all be realigned to support prevention at scale.
Blended finance models, where international donors de-risk private investment in youth-centered resilience platforms, provide further opportunities. The emphasis must shift from isolated pilots to platforms: national, standardized, repeatable, and scalable structures where youth engagement, prevention, and data collection are institutionalized.
The economic case is compelling. Embedding youth into prevention systems reduces emergency healthcare costs, lowers drug enforcement and incarceration expenditures, mitigates productivity losses, and decreases disaster recovery spending. Each young person trained and integrated into these systems becomes not a social liability but a measurable national asset.
Ultimately, prevention is not just a programmatic choice—it is a strategic, fiscal imperative. Nigeria will pay for inaction one way or another. The cost of ignoring youth resilience is already reflected in overstretched hospitals, congested prisons, disrupted education, and recurring disaster recovery bills.
Conversely, upfront investment in youth-centered resilience transforms these same individuals into actors of risk mitigation, amplifying institutional reach and lowering long-term expenditures.
Patriotism, as we have argued throughout this series, remains vital—but it is no longer sufficient as a moral appeal. In the era of climate pressure and systemic stress, patriotism is expressed through participation in national systems: monitoring health and environmental indicators, supporting peer education, and strengthening institutional response. Platforms like the FLAG Foundation, aligned with the operational capacity of NDLEA and UNODC, demonstrate that values-driven engagement can coexist with measurable, economic, and security outcomes.
Nigeria stands at a crossroads. The choice is clear: continue reacting to crises, absorbing their cost, and repeating the cycle of vulnerability—or invest decisively in prevention, embed young people within the systems that manage risk, and convert potential liability into national value. Prevention is not the absence of crisis—it is the presence of systems that make crisis unaffordable. And in this framing, youth are not only the beneficiaries of resilience; they are its builders, operators, and guarantors.
Omonon serves as the Counselor/Recovery Coach and Head of Programs at the Flag Foundation of Nigeria. She welcomes engagement from researchers, practitioners, and institutions working at the intersection of youth resilience, mental health, climate stress, and substance-use recovery. She can be reached via email at omydel@yahoo.com or WhatsApp at 0706 928 8295 for collaboration, program support, or further inquiry
