Supporting Partners; Ziva Community Initiative
- Ministry of Mines and Steel Development and its Agencies
- Civil Society, Natural Resource Governance Group,
- Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI)
- Miners Association of Nigeria
- Women in Mining Nigeria
Funders; Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP)
The project focuses on the solid mineral sector laws, policies and practices at the national and sub-national levels. And accordingly, build the capacity of both State and non-state actors to understand, synergize, advocate and engage the governance and management of natural resources. The project is focused on ensuring that resource revenues are equitably distributed and translated into socioeconomic development. The intervention also seeks to ensure that citizens are capacitated to be able to demand transparent, efficient, and effective revenue allocation, expenditure, and accounting. This is coming on the backdrop that citizens often lack the power to find out how revenues are spent or to monitor and ensure that the revenues are spent to meet their development objectives. The project shall empower citizens to monitor and track resource revenue expenditure and demand accountability and reforms from government.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index offers a multivariate form of poverty assessment, identifying deprivations across health, education, living standards, work and shocks. These are traceable to the fact that for several decades, Nigeria has continued to grapple with the challenge of effectively utilizing its resources to support equitable economic growth, effective service delivery and social cohesion. There is the belief that these challenges have remained so because a majority of government activities are shrouded in secrecy, thus constraining the involvement of non-state actors (CSOs) in the governance process.
The real evaluation of the grade of mineral or the reserve estimates is never carried out. Most of the mining operations are illegal and not known to government officials. This makes it difficult for the government to monitor their operations and enforce environmental regulations on them. Other challenges include a lack of mining equipment, predominance of artisanal and small-scale miners, poor technical capacity, lack of capital, poor database, and poor infrastructures and accessibility among others. Mining in Nigeria had been largely rudimentary and predominantly undertaken by small entrepreneurs and unlicensed, unskilled individuals, a situation that aggravates health hazards and environmental degradation. It has been documented that the country has a lot of mineral resources, but the solid mineral sector is still a minor productive sector with low contributions to the main macroeconomic areas of the economy.
Project objectives;
- To build greater synergy and opportunity for a citizen’s group to engage in issues of natural resource governance in Nigeria.
- To galvanize all mining stakeholders both at the national and states level to engage in the process of a legal and administrative framework for natural resource governance in Nigeria.
- To examine the drive for non-oil revenues, and how it will play out with existing solid minerals development law and possible sub-national governments’ interests in the mining sector
Project status – Data collection