Nigeria’s Critical Mineral Strategy

About Project

As demand grows for the minerals needed to power clean energy technologies, electric vehicles, battery storage, and other strategic industries, critical minerals have become central to global debates on energy transition, industrial policy, and economic security. For mineral-rich countries such as Nigeria, this presents an important opportunity, but also a major policy challenge. The key question is how to ensure that critical minerals development contributes to national development, local value creation, and fairer outcomes for mining communities.

Nigeria is increasingly positioning itself within the emerging global critical minerals sector. However, the country faces significant structural challenges in diversifying its economy away from oil, strengthening domestic mineral industries, and preparing for a future in which fossil fuel revenues may become less secure over the long term. Critical minerals such as lithium, rare earth elements, coltan, and bauxite, found across several Nigerian states, have become central to national debates on policy reform, economic transformation, green industrialisation, and just transition. But, without stronger institutions, clearer policy coordination, community-responsive governance, and investment in local processing and value addition, critical minerals development risks reproducing familiar extractive patterns in which raw materials leave the country with limited local benefit.

The Roadmap for Nigeria’s Critical Minerals Strategy Project

APRI launched the Roadmap for Nigeria’s Critical Minerals Strategy Project to engage stakeholders across Nigeria’s critical minerals sector, including artisanal and small-scale miners, medium- and large-scale mining companies, mining associations and professional societies, academic institutions, NGOs, civil society organisations, and government agencies.

The project explores what a responsible, self-determined, and justice-centred pathway for critical minerals development could look like for Nigeria. It examines the broader context shaping Nigeria’s minerals future, including the search for economic diversification beyond oil, growing interest in green industrialisation, mineral policy reform, and the challenge of aligning national ambitions with the realities of mining communities.

It also investigates how Nigeria’s minerals future fits within wider African debates on regional and continental cooperation, industrial strategy, and resource justice. The project contributes to a broader discussion on how mineral-rich African countries can move beyond raw extraction and use critical minerals to support economic transformation, local value addition, and a longer-term just transition.

The central questions the project seeks to answer are: