The seven areas, and why they stay separate

Ask what Nigerian churches contribute and the honest answer is a list, not a single percentage. A mission compound can hold a primary school, a clinic, a borehole, and a payroll. Each of those is real. Adding them into one “impact score” hides the school inside the borehole. The ledger keeps seven areas so a reader can see which claim is which.

None of the area pages currently carries a national total. Several carry a placeholder row so the format is visible. This report is the map of the shelves, not the contents of the boxes.

Education

Schools, universities, seminaries, teacher training, literacy classes, and scholarship schemes whose point is learning. A usable entry names the institution or the set of institutions, who runs them, and whether the figure is campuses, pupils, or teachers. Those three are not interchangeable. A university owned by a denomination and the primary schools owned by the same denomination are two entries unless the source itself published one combined count and explained it.

Healthcare

Hospitals, clinics, maternity homes, outreaches, and the training of health workers where a church body is the founder or operator. Beds, outpatient visits, and the number of facilities are different rows. A nursing school on a hospital compound is education, not a second healthcare total. Nothing in this area is medical advice, and naming a facility is not a recommendation to seek care there.

Welfare and charity

Ongoing care: children’s homes, homes for older people, feeding programmes in ordinary time, bursaries that are social support rather than the ownership of a school, prison and hospital visitation when someone has recorded a scale. The unit has to be stated. Families fed in one parish in one month is not the same claim as children resident in a home. A photograph of bags of rice is not a unit.

Employment

Jobs and training places: teachers, nurses, parish staff, and people who finished a named vocational course, when a payroll, an annual report, or a study counted them. Attendance is not employment. Staff already described inside a school or hospital entry should not be quietly added again to a national “jobs created” line unless a separate employment study says how it avoided that double count.

Economy

Cooperatives, church-linked enterprises, farms, presses, and microfinance, plus any spending-effect claim that comes with a method. This shelf has the strictest door. A conference claim that churches contribute a named share of national income needs the paper, the year, and the list of what was included. Without that, the sentence can be remembered as a speech. It will not be entered as a fact. Personal businesses of members are not automatically church contributions. Say so if a source mixes them.

Disaster relief

Response tied to an event: a flood year, a displacement crisis, an outbreak. The entry names the event, the place, the body that responded, and what was delivered. People sheltered, bags of grain, temporary clinics, and cash grants are separate measures. A social-media appeal is a lead. A later situation report is a source. Long-term care that grows out of a camp should be cross-referenced to welfare, not added on top of the original relief figure without saying so.

Community development

Work outside the school and the ward: water points, sanitation, small roads, a community hall, a peace committee with a named place and years. A borehole and a school on the same compound are two entries. If a government programme or an NGO partner built it with the church, the entry should name the partners instead of assigning the whole result to one side.

How overlap is handled

When a source mixes two areas, the entry follows the source and says the mix in the summary. We do not invent a split the document did not make. When two of our own entries describe the same institution from different sides — the hospital as healthcare, its staff count as employment — the notes should point at each other. The home page will not add those values into a headline. Headline numbers on Churchlist are counts of entries, or they are individual sourced figures on their own pages. They are not a homemade national index.

If you have a document that belongs on one of these shelves, send it through the contact form with the category you think it fits. The editor can move it. The source cannot be skipped.