Mineral exploration grants open in Nigeria under the new EMERGE endowment
The Solid Minerals Development Fund began awarding grants in July under a scheme running three streams, early-stage exploration, critical minerals and research. Executive Secretary Fatima Shinkafi has described it as a route to stronger geological data, the shortage that Nigeria’s own national exploration programme was set up to answer.
For the first time, Nigerian tertiary institutions can apply for dedicated grants to fund geoscience and mineral-processing research. The Solid Minerals Development Fund Early-Stage Mineral Exploration and Research Grant Endowment, EMERGE, began its grant processes in July, and it runs three streams, mineral exploration, critical minerals development, and research and development.
The exploration stream funds early-stage geological investigation to generate reliable mineral data, while the critical minerals stream targets the materials the energy transition requires, including lithium and rare earth elements. Grants will also be available to tertiary institutions, with the ministry saying beneficiaries will be selected through a transparent and merit-based process.
Nigeria’s national exploration programme was itself launched as a response to the shortage of investible geoscience data, and that constraint is the one the sector returns to most often. Exploration is the point in the chain where capital is most exposed and least likely to move without a public partner beside it, and a country holding minerals nobody has drilled holds an argument rather than an asset.
Fatima Shinkafi, Executive Secretary of the SMDF, has described EMERGE as a scheme that will attract investment, strengthen geological data and deepen local value addition. Dr Dele Alake, Minister of Solid Minerals Development, has said the government intends to end the era of exporting raw minerals and shift attention to refining and processing within Nigeria, and that the fund has already facilitated a 1.5 million tonne per annum aluminium refinery project.
That policy now has a working demonstration behind it, in the lithium processing plant commissioned at Endo in Nasarawa State in July, and EMERGE addresses the stage upstream of it. Refining requires something proven to refine.
The same argument ran through the Nigeria NOW! press conference in Abuja last week, where Alake, represented by Engr. Simon Nkom of the Mining Cadastre Office, set out an approach that moves the sector from extraction and export towards processing, manufacturing and employment. What EMERGE adds is money at the earliest and least commercial end of that chain, where nothing gets refined until somebody has proved it is there.
