The crisis in Nigeria, in 11 maps and charts

There’s been a ton of attention on the kidnapped Nigerian girls, both on social media and in the media more generally. But as important as up to the minute coverage of the current crisis is, it’s also important to look at the larger context: who Boko Haram, the militant group that kidnapped the girls, is; the damage they’re doing to Nigeria; and the real sources of their power. These 11 maps and charts are a good way to get started.

The first map is absolutely critical to understanding what’s going with Boko Haram. It shows Nigeria, broken down by different states, and the number of people killed or injured by Boko Haram in each state. The redder a state is, the more violence it has seen.

This tells you the most important thing about Boko Haram: their power base is overwhelmingly in northeast Nigeria. They’re strongest in Borno state, in the northeast, but have killed a lot of people around the region. There’s a reason for that.

Northeast Nigeria is one of the country’s poorer regions. Most of the wealth is concentrated in the central and southwestern states. That’s also where the oil is.

It’s not just wealth that separates the regions: it’s also the quality of governance. The below map shows the percentage of vaccinated one-year olds per state, a decent proxy for the quality of social services provided to people in different regions. The greener a state is, the more vaccinated it is — and the southwest is much greener than the rest of the country.

There’s also a sectarian element to all of this. Nigeria is split between Muslims and Christians, and the former slightly outnumber the latter. This map shows which Nigerian states have implemented a form of sharia law (purple), which have implemented sharia law in some cases relating to family or personal law (yellow), and which use purely secular law (green). That’s a useful proxy for the influence of Islam. The purple and yellow states are, unsurprisingly, the areas where Muslim Nigerians are more numerous.

See all the purple and yellow at the top, and green at the bottom? Yep, the poorer and less well-governed regions also tend to be more Muslim. This trifecta set the stage for Boko Haram’s emergence as a major force in Nigerian politics.

Over time, and partly in reaction to a heavy-handed crackdown by the Nigerian government, Boko Haram has gotten much more violent. Here’s a chart tracking people killed in Boko Haram-related fighting since 2009, when the movement’s conflict with the central government turned bloody. There are peaks in 2009, early 2012 (when the government and Boko Haram fought in earnest), and September 2013, but the clear overall trend is towards more deadly violence.

When you include 2014 numbers, the picture looks even worse. This chart plots Boko Haram related violence and deaths against each other for the past year and a half, and shows a clear trend towards more violent attacks.

In fact, Boko Haram kills more people per attack than Islamist terrorist organizations anywhere in the world. This next chart shows the countries with the ten most violent Islamist insurgencies in 2013. While Syria and Iraq have the highest overall casualty rates, Nigeria sees the most deaths per attack, virtually all of which are attributable to Boko Haram.

So even compared to al-Qaeda, Boko Haram is deadly.

Nigeria isn’t in a super-calm neighborhood. To the north and west, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a powerful franchise of the global terrorist group, operates with some impunity. Northwest Africa is a hub for the global drug and slave trades. This BBC map situates Boko Haram’s region near those where drug traffickers and fellow Islamic extremists do their dirty work.

Boko Haram collaborates with AQIM and other likeminded Islamist groups. The chart below uses data on Islamist fundraising, joint planning, and declarations to find links between Boko Haram and other Islamist groups, as well as its targets.

Their most important relationship is with AQIM, but they also have worked with Somalia’s al-Shabaab and Mali’s Ansar al-Dine. Boko Haram’s attacks have principally been in Nigeria, but the sources of their strength extend well beyond its borders. For instance, AQIM provides Boko Haram with weapons, money, and combat training — and because the support comes from well outside of Nigeria’s borders, it’s very hard for the central Nigerian government to disrupt.

Girls are particularly hurt. In some regions of the country, one girl is in school for every three boys in school. That manifests in extremely low rates of female literacy, particularly in the poor and poorly governed Muslim north. This map breaks that down.

Boko Haram’s kidnappings are making this worse. Since the girls were abducted, “most secondary schools” in Borno have closed, according to The Economist. The longer Boko Haram keeps operating, and sticks to its recent pattern of attacking school-age girls, the more disruptions to any effort to improve female education in Nigeria could continue.

So Boko Haram’s violent campaign against “Western” influence in Nigeria, which it sees as including the education of girls, may well be having the intended effect: hurting Nigeria’s young women.