From Aid Recipient to Workforce Participant: The UNHCR-TGI Group Partnership and What It Means for Nigeria's 3.5 Million Displaced People

In August 2024, inside a conference room in Abuja, two organisations that have rarely shared the same table signed a document that represents one of the more ambitious bets in the recent history of Nigerian humanitarian policy. UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, and Tropical General Investments Group — one of Nigeria's largest and most diversified private conglomerates — formalised a five-year cooperation agreement whose stated objective is to transform the economic status of displaced Nigerians from beneficiaries of aid into participants in the country's formal workforce and agricultural economy. The partnership has been receiving renewed attention in June 2026 as its second year of implementation is now underway and as it sits within a broader national and international policy environment that has shifted, decisively and irreversibly, away from the emergency relief model that dominated humanitarian response in Nigeria for the previous decade and toward the language and logic of self-reliance, economic inclusion, and durable solutions.

The agreement is a Memorandum of Understanding formalising a five-year cooperation framework between UNHCR Nigeria, led at the time of signing by UNHCR Representative Arjun Jain, and TGI Group, represented by its Vice Chairman Farouk Gumel. The 10,000-job target that the partnership is designed to create over its operational lifespan is embedded within a broader ambition that goes beyond job numbers to address the structural economic exclusion that has defined the lives of Nigeria's internally displaced persons and refugees across most of the past decade. The focus is primarily on agricultural value chain integration, skills development, and financial inclusion — three interconnected mechanisms that reflect a specific diagnosis of why displaced people in Nigeria remain economically marginalised and what it would take to change that.

To understand why this partnership was formed in the way it was, it is necessary to understand the scale and character of displacement in Nigeria — because Nigeria's displacement crisis is not a crisis in the conventional sense of something that arrived suddenly and will eventually depart. It is a crisis in the structural sense of something that has been building across multiple overlapping conflict and climate drivers for more than a decade and that has produced a population of displaced people so large, so geographically distributed, and so economically varied in its composition that no single response framework could address it.

By the end of 2024, Nigeria hosted approximately 3.5 million internally displaced persons — people who have been forced from their homes by violence, insecurity, or climate disasters but who remain within Nigerian borders. These 3.5 million IDPs are distributed across the country's most conflict-affected regions: the North-East, where Boko Haram and ISWAP have conducted a sustained insurgency for more than fifteen years; the North-West, where banditry and armed group activity have produced mass displacement particularly in Zamfara, Katsina, and Kebbi states — the same displacement dynamic that ASUU's Commissioner for Women Affairs described in January 2026 as the source of the southward migration of armed elements that eventually reached Oyo State; and the Middle Belt, where farmer-herder conflicts and resource competition have generated a population of over 600,000 IDPs as recently confirmed in UNHCR's operational factsheet for 2026. Beyond its own displaced population, Nigeria also hosted 127,000 refugees and asylum seekers from 41 countries by the end of 2024, while nearly 400,000 Nigerian refugees remained in neighbouring countries, principally in the Lake Chad Basin nations of Cameroon, Niger, and Chad, where many have lived in exile for years and where voluntary repatriation remains a priority for UNHCR even as conditions of safety and reception inside Nigeria are inconsistently available.

The geography of Nigerian displacement has specific economic consequences that the TGI partnership is designed to address. Most of Nigeria's IDPs have been living in the Middle Belt, North-East, and North-West for more than a decade — not in temporary emergency camps waiting for an imminent return home, but in semi-permanent displacement in communities where they are neither fully integrated into local economic systems nor able to maintain the livelihoods they had before displacement. Many IDPs who were farmers before displacement have lost access to their land, their tools, their seed stock, and the seasonal agricultural relationships — with other farmers, with buyers, with input suppliers — that made their farming economically productive. Rebuilding those relationships in a new location, often in a host community that is already economically stretched by the arrival of large numbers of displaced people competing for the same limited opportunities, is not something that emergency food distributions or shelter assistance programmes are designed to achieve.

This is the economic gap that TGI Group is positioned to fill in a way that no humanitarian agency acting alone could replicate, and it is the reason that the UNHCR-TGI partnership represents something qualitatively different from the conventional public-private partnership model in which a company makes a philanthropic donation to a humanitarian cause and receives a credit line in the annual report.

TGI Group is not a charity and has not entered this partnership in a charitable spirit. It is a diversified agricultural and food industry conglomerate whose operations span farming, agro-processing, fertiliser production, consumer food manufacturing, and financial services, and whose business model depends on the existence of a large, productive, well-supplied agricultural value chain in Nigeria. The group's interests in the partnership are commercial as much as they are social: integrating displaced smallholder farmers into its outgrower programmes — the network of contracted farmers who grow crops to TGI's specifications and sell their harvest to TGI's processing operations — expands the group's agricultural supply base while providing those farmers with a guaranteed market, technical support, and access to inputs they could not otherwise obtain. Gumel's description of the partnership as leveraging TGI's work with smallholder farmers as a model for IDP integration was not a repackaging of charity as business. It was an accurate description of how the commercial logic and the humanitarian logic of the arrangement point in the same direction.

The partnership's operational framework covers six interconnected areas. Value chain integration places displaced farmers within TGI's established agricultural supply networks as contracted outgrowers, providing them with a structured market relationship that addresses the fundamental economic problem of farming without buyers. Land recovery — one of the most challenging dimensions of displacement-affected agriculture in Nigeria's context — involves working with government authorities and community leaders to facilitate displaced farmers' ability to access agricultural land, either by supporting their eventual return to original landholdings or by facilitating access to alternative land in their current locations. Agricultural inputs provision gives participating displaced farmers access to TGI's fertiliser, seed, and crop protection products through structured credit arrangements rather than cash grants, creating a production-linked relationship rather than a dependency relationship. Skills development addresses the reality that some displaced people — particularly young people who were displaced before completing their agricultural education — need training in modern farming techniques, post-harvest handling, and value addition before they can participate productively in commercial agricultural systems. Employment creates direct jobs within TGI's processing facilities and operational infrastructure for displaced people whose skills and circumstances make wage employment a better pathway than independent farming. And financial inclusion addresses the banking and savings exclusion that affects most displaced people in Nigeria, working with TGI's financial services operations to open formal accounts and build financial records that are prerequisites for accessing credit and insurance in the broader economy.

The five-year timeframe of the MOU — running from August 2024 through approximately August 2029 — is deliberately aligned with the planning horizons of both organisations. For UNHCR, five years provides enough time to move from pilot implementation in a limited geographic area to scaled operations across multiple displacement-affected states. For TGI, five years is the planning horizon within which outgrower programme expansion and processing capacity investment decisions are made, meaning that the displaced communities being integrated into the supply chain in year one have sufficient time to become established, reliable suppliers before the agreement's initial term concludes. The 10,000-job target is spread across the five-year period rather than concentrated in a single year, with the expectation that early implementation builds the evidence base, the community relationships, and the operational infrastructure for accelerating in later years.

The national policy environment in which the partnership is operating has become more supportive since the MOU was signed. Nigeria's forthcoming National Development Plan for 2026 to 2030, which UNHCR and its partners highlighted in a high-level delegation to Yobe State in October 2025, presents what officials described as a critical opportunity to embed durable solutions for IDPs into national development and financing priorities — making the movement from humanitarian response to economic self-reliance not just a partnership-specific ambition but a nationally owned policy commitment. Yobe State's own State Action Plan on Durable Solutions, under which the state has committed 24 percent of its annual budget to implementing durable solutions for displaced people — one of the most significant government budget allocations for this purpose anywhere in the world — demonstrates that the enabling environment at the state level is, in the most affected regions, moving in the direction the TGI partnership requires.

The challenges the partnership faces are real and should not be minimised by the ambition of its objectives. The geographic areas where Nigeria's displaced people are concentrated are also the areas where insecurity is most acute, where infrastructure is most limited, and where the operating environment for any commercial enterprise — including TGI's agricultural operations — is most challenging. An outgrower programme that works smoothly in a peaceful agricultural area of Benue State faces fundamentally different conditions in a community in Borno State that is still within range of ISWAP activity or in a Middle Belt community where farmer-herder conflict can disrupt agricultural operations at any time. The land recovery component of the programme is politically and legally complex in ways that UNHCR's community engagement expertise and TGI's local government relationships can help navigate but cannot fully resolve. The financial inclusion component requires banking infrastructure that does not uniformly exist in the communities where displaced people are located, and building it requires coordination with financial sector actors and regulators that extends well beyond the two signatories' immediate capacities.

The complementary private sector partnerships that UNHCR has been building in parallel with the TGI arrangement provide important context for understanding how the agency is approaching Nigeria's displacement crisis as a systemic challenge rather than a series of bilateral agreements. Outsource Global, a pan-African business process outsourcing company, has committed through a partnership with UNHCR to creating sustainable employment pathways specifically for IDPs and refugees in Nigeria in white-collar professional roles — customer service, data management, accounting, legal support, human resources, and software development — representing an entirely different segment of the displaced population whose skills and circumstances are oriented toward the services sector rather than agriculture. The commitment, made at the Africa Forum on Displacement 2025, to help 1,000 forcibly displaced people access direct income-generating jobs across Africa builds on UNHCR's recognition that the displaced population is not monolithic in its skills, education level, or economic aspirations, and that the pathway from displacement to self-reliance must be multiple rather than singular.

BusinessDay's February 2026 reporting on displaced Nigerians turning displacement challenges into opportunities documented the reality that this ecosystem of private sector partnerships is already producing individual stories of economic transformation — including an entrepreneur operating in Abuja and Gombe who hires and trains IDPs for remote white-collar roles and is opening a 300-seat centre in Maiduguri, taking the TGI-UNHCR logic of displaced-people-as-skilled-workforce and applying it to the digital economy in a state capital that is geographically at the centre of Nigeria's most protracted displacement crisis.

What the UNHCR-TGI partnership represents, in the broadest terms, is a test of a hypothesis that the humanitarian system has been building toward for years and that the failure of the aid dependency model has made urgent. The hypothesis is this: that displaced people in Nigeria are not primarily a welfare problem to be managed through distributions of food, shelter, and cash, but an economic resource to be unlocked through investment, market access, skills development, and the same kind of structured commercial relationships that any other agricultural community needs to be productive. If the 10,000 jobs target is achieved — if displaced smallholder farmers are integrated into TGI's outgrower networks in sufficient numbers to make the agricultural production link self-sustaining, if displaced young people receive skills training that makes them employable in TGI's processing facilities, if financial inclusion gives displaced households the tools to save, borrow, and insure against the risks that poverty makes most dangerous — then the partnership will have demonstrated something that Nigeria's policymakers, international funders, and private sector actors can learn from and replicate at scale.

The 3.5 million IDPs who constitute the problem this partnership exists to address are not waiting for the demonstration to conclude. They are living, right now, in the Middle Belt and the North-East and the North-West, in conditions that UNHCR's protection assessments describe with the clinical precision of institutional monitoring and that the people living in those conditions experience with the full weight of human reality. Twenty percent of the individuals assessed in protection surveys in the North-East face risks of attacks and killings. The Middle Belt hosts over 600,000 IDPs due to escalating resource conflicts. Floods in 2024 affected 480,000 additional people in just the North-East states of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe. The displacement is not ending. The conflict drivers that produce it are not resolving on any near-term timeline. What can change is the economic status of the people already displaced, and that is precisely what Farouk Gumel and Arjun Jain signed a document to attempt in Abuja in August 2024.

The next three years of the five-year agreement will determine whether the attempt is succeeding at the scale the 10,000-job target requires. UNHCR's 2026 Global Appeal establishes economic inclusion and self-reliance as central strategic priorities across all its Nigeria operations, and the TGI partnership sits within that strategy as its most commercially structured and potentially its most replicable element. The story is not finished. But it is, two years in, demonstrably underway.

Sources

1. UNHCR Nigeria — UNHCR and TGI Group Forge Alliance to Empower Nigeria's Forcibly Displaced Communities — https://www.unhcr.org/ng/news/press-releases/unhcr-and-tgi-group-forge-alliance-empower-nigeria-s-forcibly-displaced
2. TechEconomy — UNHCR and TGI Group Forge Alliance to Empower Nigeria's Displaced Communities — https://techeconomy.ng/unhcr-and-tgi-group-forge-alliance-to-empower-nigerias-displaced-communities/
3. UNHCR — Nigeria Country Page: Displacement Data and Strategy — https://www.unhcr.org/where-we-work/countries/nigeria
4. UNHCR — Global Appeal 2026: Economic Inclusion and Private Sector Partnerships — https://www.unhcr.org/publications/global-appeal-2026
5. UNHCR Africa — UN Commends Nigeria for Its Leadership in Addressing Internal Displacement — https://www.unhcr.org/africa/news/press-releases/un-commends-nigeria-its-leadership-addressing-internal-displacement
6. UNHCR Operational Data Portal — Nigeria Country Factsheet 2026 — https://data.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/119230
7. UNHCR Operational Data Portal — Nigeria Country Page — https://data.unhcr.org/en/country/nga
8. BusinessDay Nigeria — Nigerians Turn Displacement Challenges Into Opportunities — https://businessday.ng/exclusives/article/nigerians-turn-displacement-challenges-into-opportunities/