Mining & Natural ResourcesOpen

Design a School Curriculum Module on Responsible Mining for Secondary Students in Kaduna

Create a ready-to-teach curriculum module that gives secondary school students in Kaduna State a grounded understanding of what mining does to land, water, and livelihoods, and what responsible practice looks like. Most young Nigerians in mining communities grow up with no formal education on the industry shaping their environment.

The brief

Kaduna State sits at the edge of Nigeria's solid minerals belt. Towns like Kafanchan and Zaria have teenagers whose families work in or around quarrying, sand mining, and artisanal gold extraction, yet secondary school curricula treat mining as an abstract economics topic, if they cover it at all. A generation is growing up without the vocabulary to advocate for themselves or their communities. You are designing a two-week curriculum module (roughly six to eight lesson periods) for JSS3 or SS1 students. The module should cover: how mining works at the artisanal and industrial scale, the environmental and health effects of common practices, how communities have rights under Nigerian law, and what responsible extraction looks like in practice. It should be grounded in local examples, not South African or Australian case studies. The deliverable is a complete module pack: a teacher guide with learning objectives and lesson plans, student worksheets or activity cards for at least three sessions, and a short assessment (quiz or group task) at the end. Materials should work in a classroom with no electricity, no projector, and a teacher who is not a subject expert. Strong work will be honest about what is age-appropriate and what is politically sensitive in a context where local officials may have interests in mining. The best submissions will have been tested or reviewed by at least one teacher, and will show evidence of that conversation.