Nigeria’s critical minerals sector holds immense potential, but faces systemic value loss and informality. This report analyses the stakeholder and institutional landscape shaping its strategy.
This report provides a multi-dimensional analysis of the stakeholder and institutional landscape shaping Nigeria’s critical minerals sector. It synthesises the main outputs of Phase 1 of APRI’s project, the Roadmap for Nigeria’s critical minerals strategy, drawing on field engagement in five mineral-rich states, the development of interactive Stakeholder and Policy databases, and a review of the institutional and governance architecture underpinning critical minerals development in the country.
In this report, the term ‘critical minerals’ refers primarily to minerals of growing strategic importance to energy transition, industrial development and supply-chain security. Because mining realities at the community level often involve mixed mineral occurrences and associated extraction, the report also notes other strategically relevant minerals encountered during field engagement that help explain local livelihoods, value chain dynamics and governance conditions.
Nigeria has significant deposits of the critical minerals lithium, columbite-tantalite and bauxite, as well as rare earth elements (REEs) and other strategic minerals, all of which are increasingly relevant to global clean energy transitions. Despite this mineral endowment, the mining sector is characterised by widespread informality, raw mineral extraction and export, weak institutional coordination, limited value addition and low benefit capture for mining communities. Phase 1 of the project was designed to build the grounded evidence base needed to better understand these dynamics; address how Nigeria’s critical minerals sector is currently structured across stakeholders, institutions, policies and mining-community realities; and identify the reforms needed to move the sector towards more coordinated, value-added and justice-centred development.
The report shows that Nigeria’s critical minerals ecosystem is broad but fragmented. Institutional mandates exist, but coordination and implementation remain uneven. Mining communities, artisanal and small-scale miners, women, and local actors remain insufficiently integrated into formal decision-making and sector planning processes. The findings suggest that the current structure of the sector continues to favour low local value retention, limited processing and beneficiation, weak pricing transparency and poor access to mineral testing and formal support systems
Rising global strategic interest in critical minerals has increased Nigeria's negotiating leverage with bilateral partners, multilateral development institutions and clean energy investors. Growing attention to supply chain security among major economies such as the EU, the US, Japan and others creates conditions under which Nigeria may be able to attract more ambitious investment terms than the current raw-extraction model commands. Regionally, Nigeria’s ratification of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and emerging African Union (AU) and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) frameworks on critical minerals and green industrialisation create additional pathways for value-chain integration and beneficiation investment within West Africa and the wider continent.
The Stakeholder and Policy databases developed for this project provide a practical foundation for more targeted engagement, stronger policy coherence and improved visibility of the institutions and actors shaping the sector. Renewed government attention to the solid minerals sector, including signals from the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development (MSMD) on licensing reform and formalisation, also provides an institutional opening for targeted advocacy and reform dialogue.
Field engagement further shows that mining communities have articulated a clear and practical vision of justice-centred mineral development: transparent partnerships between companies and communities, fully implemented Community Development Agreements (CDAs), employment and skills opportunities for local people, community infrastructure investment, and meaningful consent processes. The report identifies the main coordination gaps, stakeholder dynamics, institutional weaknesses and community-level concerns that should inform the next stage of analysis and engagement. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a more evidence-based and politically informed roadmap for Nigeria’s critical minerals strategy.
Phase 1 used a mixed-method approach combining field visits to mining communities in Nasarawa, Kogi, Kwara, Benue and Oyo states; focus group discussions (FGDs) and structured interviews with artisanal and small-scale miners, community leaders, and state-level actors; stakeholder ecosystem mapping across fourteen categories; and a comprehensive review of the policy and regulatory landscape. The stakeholder mapping was consolidated into two interactive databases: a Stakeholder database and a Policy database, accessible through APRI’s project webpage. Survey data were collected from 106 artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) practitioners across four states.
Nigeria’s critical minerals sector would benefit from a focused reform agenda built around five priorities: accessible formalisation, transparent mineral valuation, stronger institutional coordination, enforceable community benefit mechanisms and domestic technical capacity. Some of these are achievable in the near term through administrative action alone, notably the implementation of a tiered licensing model that reduces cost and complexity for artisanal miners, cooperatives and small companies. Others require sustained investment and coordination over a longer horizon: accessible mineral testing and evaluation services to close pricing information gaps; reactivated and resourced MIREMCO structures to improve coordination between federal institutions, state actors, companies and communities; and stronger monitoring and enforcement of CDAs, with the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) potentially supporting greater transparency. Investment in Nigerian universities, geological training institutions and research capacity would strengthen the domestic knowledge base needed to build a future workforce and to support more self-determined critical-minerals governance over time.
Dr Munira Raji is a Senior Research Fellow translating scientific evidence into actionable policy and strategies for critical minerals and green industrialisation in mineral-rich countries.
Isabella Roberts is a Programme Manager and Innovation Incubator focused on international political economy, dissent, and cosmological practices in Africa and its diaspora.
