The scramble for ‘green economy’ lithium is bringing strain and uncertainty for rural West Africans

A tense situation between residents of Touvre, a small farming community of about 5,000 in Côte d’Ivoire, and a company searching for lithium in the area, came to a head last spring.

Villagers took to the streets to protest against the business’s activities. They were met with live gun fire from AK-47s and tear gas from the local police. Though no one was shot, three women were taken to hospital, medical reports seen by openDemocracy show.

At the heart of the residents’ discontent, says Coulibaly Ibrahima, Cote d’Ivoire’s director general for mines, was that the licence to search for lithium in the area had switched hands from Ivorians to a foreign company: Firering Strategic Minerals, which is registered in Cyprus and listed on London’s AIM stock exchange. Around the time of the deal, prospecting activities escalated.

Even at the exploration stage, mining activities are dramatically disruptive to other economic activities in the area. Graders were furrowing through their farms. But, the fellow Ivorians who had first approached village elders to sell the idea that mining the area for lithium would improve local lives, were nowhere to be found. “Overnight, the villagers see the presence of other people on the ground. They were used to seeing Black people and one morning they see white people,” Ibrahima told openDemocracy.

Simmering dissatisfaction with the project and its disruption to farming activities, bubbled into the street protests.

Touvre sits along the Birimian Greenstone belt, a rich geologic formation which extends over 800 kilometres north, from West Africa’s Atlantic shores right through to the semi-arid Sahel. Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Mali all sit prominently along the belt, and tensions similar to those in Touvre are likely to spread to many of their communities in the rush for lithium, a critical mineral for the electric batteries that the developed world is betting on to wean itself from fossil fuels and transition to ‘green economies’ . Advanced exploration projects are already underway across the region.

In Ghana, the most developed project to date is in Ewoyaa, which sits adjacent to the Kakum National Park, 100 kilometres west of Accra. Atlantic Lithium (formerly IronRidge Resources), an Australian AIM-listed company, was granted a licence by the government in 2021 to search for lithium over an area spanning 560 square kilometres that is covered in tropical vegetation, small holdings and tin-roofed villages. openDemocracy spoke to many people in the area. While largely optimistic about future job opportunities from the project, they also complained about destruction to their crops and inadequate compensation from the prospectors. Villagers have seen the trees they rely on for firewood and charcoal being felled at a speed they had not anticipated.