Correlates of Entrepreneurial Success Among Internally Displaced Persons in North East Nigeria: Evidence from Borno and Adamawa

This study identifies and empirically analyses the correlates of entrepreneurial success among internally displaced persons who have established small businesses in resettlement camps and host communities in Borno and Adamawa States, North East Nigeria, contributing to a critical evidence gap on the determinants of enterprise viability under conflict displacement conditions. IDP entrepreneurship is increasingly recognised as a livelihood recovery strategy, but the specific human capital, social capital, and institutional conditions that differentiate successful IDP enterprises from those that fail have not been empirically quantified in the Nigerian context. The study employs a cross-sectional survey of 200 IDP entrepreneurs drawn from six IDP settlements and host communities in Maiduguri and Yola. Entrepreneurial success is operationalised as enterprise survival combined with household poverty indicator improvement over a 12-month period. Independent variables include pre-displacement business experience, ethnic network density in the settlement location, access to humanitarian enterprise support programmes, education level, and skills relevance of the enterprise to the settlement demand environment. Binary logistic regression analysis identifies significant success predictors. Findings indicate that pre-displacement business experience is the strongest predictor of IDP enterprise success, followed by alignment between the entrepreneur's skill set and the goods or services most needed in the settlement community. Humanitarian enterprise support programme access shows a positive but modest effect, moderated by programme quality. Recommendations include skills-matching analysis as a prerequisite for enterprise support allocation in IDP resettlement programming. Keywords: IDP entrepreneurship, conflict displacement, North East Nigeria, entrepreneurial success, resettlement.