Ask people living beside a mine in rural Nigeria who holds the licence, what is being extracted, or what the company owes the community, and many cannot say. That gap is what Urban Alert, a Nigerian civic-tech organisation focused on extractive transparency, set out to close with Minetrix AI, a chatbot that answers questions about the country’s solid minerals sector in English, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. Founder Anthony Adejuwon says his team spent nine months building it, loading more than 37,000 documents from government registries, research bodies and civil society groups, and that it is now in pilot testing across Nigeria. Those figures are the team’s own, but Techpoint Africa separately reports that the platform has drawn more than 1,200 unique users since launch, with roughly a quarter to a third returning.
The problem it targets is documented. In May 2026, Premium Times reported from Shiroro in Niger State, where residents of Farin Doki and Ajata Aboki identified four mining sites, two run by local artisanal miners and two by companies they could not name. A youth leader told the paper, “We don’t know the names of those companies.” Nigeria’s Mining Cadastre Office does publish a register of mining titles online, but the reporting found that weak internet, low digital literacy, limited smartphone ownership and interfaces without local languages put that data out of reach for the people most affected. Adejuwon says Urban Alert has seen the same pattern in Kaduna, Plateau, Osun, Ogun, Ekiti and Ebonyi.
The question communities most need answered is what they are owed. Under Section 116 of the Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act 2007, a mining lease holder must conclude a Community Development Agreement with the host community before operations begin. Official guidelines say the agreement is signed by three to seven representatives chosen by the community, runs for five years, and covers items such as development programmes, environmental protection, compensation and conflict resolution, with the signed copy going to the Minister for approval. TechCabal’s reporting on Minetrix says the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative found these agreements were held in hard copy by the ministry’s compliance department and available to the public only on formal request, with digitisation under way. In other words, a community may need to file a request just to read the document that spells out what it is owed.
Minetrix uses what the team calls a retrieval-first design: it looks up relevant documents in its own database before writing an answer, rather than pulling from the open web, and it cites its sources. Questions about a mining title draw on the agency that issues titles, and questions about the law draw on the legal texts. Users can revisit earlier conversations through an audit log, and the team says the system can switch to a lighter format when a connection drops. That design reduces the risk of invented answers, but it does not remove it, and this newsroom has not independently tested the accuracy of its responses. It is also only as complete as its records, so it cannot reveal who is behind an unlicensed operation that appears in no register.
There are open tensions the team itself acknowledges. The platform is web-based and requires an email sign-up, while the communities it describes often have weak connectivity and few smartphones, so an app, audio responses and accessibility features are planned over the coming year. Adejuwon says keeping people who combine geology or legal expertise with software skills is hard against commercial competition, and that funding is scarce for public-interest technology compared with revenue-generating software. Urban Alert is weighing a move into Ghana and other West African mining jurisdictions. For host communities, journalists and researchers, the immediate value is simpler: a way to start asking better questions about who profits from the ground beneath them.
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