Survival Strategies of Market Women and Violent Conflicts in Jos, Nigeria.

Jos, the capital city of Plateau State, Nigeria, have over the past one decade been subjected to internecine violent conflicts. The causes had range from mutual communal, ethnic to religious mistrust. Efforts have been made to halt the senseless violent disturbances to no avail. The conflict situation by any measure can best be described an active conflict, considering the abrupt and rampant nature of how the conflict most times occur. Women, in most conflict situations remain a vulnerable social category. Women engage themselves a lot in petty trading and marketing. They sell vegetables, fruits and also participate in wide range of other commercial activities in most markets that pervade Jos city. Centrally, the paper seeks to examine and analyze the various strategies and initiatives these market women employ to survive and make a living in their respective chosen businesses given the conflict prone nature of the environment within which they conduct their business activities. The paper depended on interviews and Focus Group Discussions carried out in 2012 and 2013 part of PhD research. The paper concludes that the strategies and initiatives employed by small-scale women entrepreneurs in Jos during violence has kept them safe and ensured their livelihoods especially for women who have assumed new roles of household heads. It further made suggestions to government and the general public on how to mitigate the intractable violent encounters in Jos in order to further promote women participation in commercial activities without unnecessarily resorting to stressful and risky survival strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]