Who owns the wealth beneath your feet? The AI engine exposing Nigeria’s ‘hidden’ miners

Across rural Nigeria, host communities watch heavy machinery dig up their land daily. But ask locals who hold the operational licence, what minerals are being extracted, or what community benefits they are legally owed—and the room goes silent. To fight this “information opacity,” Anthony Adejuwon and his team at Urban Alert spent nine months building Minetrix AI. By ingesting over 37,000 public records, land registries, and environmental audits into a multilingual conversational engine (available in English, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba), the platform gives communities the exact data they need to negotiate Community Development Agreements from a position of knowledge. In this feature, JOHN ADOYI explores how retrieval-first AI is turning paper archives into public power, and why civic tech might just rewrite the rules of Africa’s extractive sector.

For over six years, Anthony Adejuwan has worked alongside Nigerian communities impacted by solid mineral extraction. Across dozens of rural settlements, he repeatedly observed the same predicament: residents knew active mining was taking place on their land, yet could not ascertain who held the operational licences, what minerals were being extracted, or what statutory rights they possessed as host communities.

“The problem is that people can only ask questions from what they know,” Adejuwon told TechCabal. Without access to the right information, he said, communities, journalists, and researchers struggle to ask the questions they need to understand what is happening in the sector.

That systemic opacity prompted Adejuwan and his team at Urban Alert—a Nigerian civic-tech organisation focused on extractive transparency—to spend nine months building Minetrix AI. The conversational platform enables users to query Nigeria’s solid minerals sector in English, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. To establish factual context, the team ingested and indexed more than 37,000 documents sourced from government registries, research bodies, and civil society organisations.

The information gap

The information barrier facing these communities is rarely a matter of non-existent data; rather, it is a problem of accessibility and comprehension. Adejuwan characterises this as an “information opacity” crisis within Nigeria’s solid minerals industry.

“Data is often buried behind fragmented government portals, locked on physical office shelves, or presented in technical formats and languages that ordinary citizens cannot digest,” he explains.

Public repositories do exist. The Mining Cadastre Office (MCO) maintains a central register of mining titles, while the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) publishes data on licences, production volumes, corporate entities, and royalty payments. However, administrative disclosure does not automatically translate into community usability.

A May 2026 investigation by Premium Times in Shiroro, Niger State, illustrated this divide. Residents affected by gold mining struggled to identify the commercial entities operating four sites across Farin Doki and Ajata Aboki, or verify whether they possessed valid permits. While two sites were known to be worked by local artisanal miners, the corporate entities backing the remaining sites remained completely anonymous to the community. Poor internet connectivity, low digital literacy, and limited smartphone access further compound these barriers.

NEITI’s 2023 Solid Minerals Industry Audit Report says Community Development Agreements (CDAs) between mining companies and host communities were being kept in hard copy by the Mining Environmental Compliance Department. The documents could be accessed by the public through a formal request, while the ministry was working to digitise them. The audit also noted the absence of specific government policies on the public disclosure of CDAs.

The agreements are important because they set out the social and economic benefits expected to flow to host communities. Yet, a community may still have to make a formal request to see the document that spells out what its mining operator is expected to provide.

For someone living next to a mining operation, basic questions around mine ownership, mining history, what the miners are allowed to do, and benefits the community is obligated to receive, ultimately require navigating different institutions, databases, and documents.

Adejuwon said this was a pattern Urban Alert had encountered across the communities where it has worked, including in Kaduna, Plateau, Osun, Ogun, Ekiti, and Ebonyi.

“People can only ask questions from what they know,” he said. Without access to information, communities may not know who to approach or even which questions to ask.

For Urban Alert, closing that gap became the starting point for Minetrix AI.

How Minetrix AI works

Building Minetrix AI required Urban Alert to aggregate and standardise disparate datasets, collaborating closely with software engineers, geospatial analysts, mining engineers, and geologists.

“It’s quite difficult because they are in different formats from different sources,” Adejuwon said. “The first thing is to first ensure the kind of information available from each sector within the sector … and convert the format in which they have their publications into formats readable by Minetrix.”

Minetrix is currently a web-based platform. After signing up with an email address, users are taken to a conversational interface where they can type questions about minerals and mining in Nigeria. They can ask questions in English, Hausa, Igbo, or Yoruba, and the platform responds within seconds.

Adejuwon said AI was important because of the amount of information the system has to synthesise and the need to respond across multiple languages.

Minetrix AI uses a “retrieval-first” design. When a user asks a question, the system first retrieves relevant information from the documents in its database before generating a response.

“It’s not trained in a way that it’s just going to go and search for responses online, which may or may not really be trustworthy,” Adejuwan said.

The platform also provides citations for the information used in its responses. A question about a mining title, for example, would draw from documents released by the government agency responsible for issuing titles, while questions about mining laws would draw from relevant laws, regulations, and other legal documents.

Users can keep track of their previous questions and responses through an audit log. Adejuwan said this allows them to return to earlier conversations rather than starting again each time they use the platform.

The system is also designed to continue working around interruptions in internet access. Adejuwan said that when a user’s connection drops, Minetrix AI can switch to a format that allows them to continue developing their understanding of the sector, then return to their previous conversation when the connection is restored.

For now, the platform remains web-based, although Adejuwan said Urban Alert plans to develop an app as it tries to reach young users. The organisation also plans to add audio functionality and other accessibility features for people with disabilities.

Adejuwan said the mining data and records on Minetrix AI are periodically updated as new information becomes available. The team adds relevant material from government agencies and other stakeholders so that users are not relying on outdated records.

The result is intended to feel less like searching through a collection of documents and more like having a conversation with the information contained in them.

The real test

Minetrix AI is undergoing active pilot testing across Nigeria, and early user engagement has upended Urban Alert’s initial projections.

The team originally cautioned that a niche civic-tech product focused on mining governance might struggle to gain traction in an ecosystem dominated by commercial fintech. “A major lesson for us was never to underestimate public demand for civic accountability,” Adejuwan reflects. “Citizens actively seek out tools that demystify public interest data.”

Encouraged by this uptake, Urban Alert is evaluating expansion into Ghana and other West African mining jurisdictions. Scaling the platform, however, presents distinct operational headwinds—chief among them being the retention of specialised cross-disciplinary talent.

“We are not merely building a software product; we are building a domain-specific solution for the extractive industry,” Adejuwan explains. “That requires professionals who possess deep geological and legal expertise alongside software development capabilities—a talent pool that is difficult to retain against commercial market competition.”

Sustainable funding remains an equal hurdle within a venture landscape that heavily favours revenue-generating commercial software over public-interest technology.

Over the coming year, Urban Alert aims to achieve compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) by integrating text-to-speech audio responses tailored for visually impaired users and low-literacy communities.

Ultimately, Adejuwan views technology as a catalyst for community empowerment. “Our ultimate goal is to cultivate informed host communities capable of negotiating Community Development Agreements from a position of knowledge,” he concludes. “We want to ensure that mineral wealth yields tangible local development, rather than environmental degradation and silent extraction.”

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