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.
Originally published by TechCabal.