Ghana’s Ewoyaa lithium project holds 35.3 million tonnes of ore and is positioned to make the country West Africa’s first commercial lithium producer, feeding the battery supply chains that global EV manufacturers depend on. New academic research drawing on fieldwork in Ghana’s lithium communities argues that the dominant risk framework for the project, which focuses on geopolitics, company negotiations and state fiscal terms, is missing the factor most likely to actually disrupt supply: the communities living on the land.
Ghana discovered commercially viable lithium deposits at Ewoyaa in the Central Region in 2018. In October 2023, the government granted a 15-year mining lease to Barari DV Ghana Limited, a subsidiary of Australian miner Atlantic Lithium. The deposit carries estimated reserves of 35.3 million tonnes at an average grade of 1.25 percent lithium oxide, with a projected mine life of 12 years and expected output of approximately 3.6 million tonnes of spodumene concentrate. The Minerals Income Investment Fund has taken a 6 percent equity stake, with a total state investment of $32.9 million, signalling national commitment to capture a share of project upside rather than just royalties. Ghana has been identified as one of Africa’s emerging critical minerals frontiers, alongside established producers in South Africa, Zambia and the DRC.
The project has already faced one significant political setback. In late 2024, the government withdrew the original lease agreement from parliamentary ratification after analysts and campaigners warned that the terms shortchanged Ghana at a moment when battery mineral demand was accelerating. Atlantic Lithium subsequently revised its offer, introducing sliding-scale royalties that increase as lithium prices rise. Parliamentary review of the new terms is ongoing. The renegotiation exposed a structural asymmetry: Ghana’s government relied heavily on feasibility studies commissioned by Atlantic Lithium itself, limiting its ability to independently evaluate the terms. The Natural Resource Governance Institute’s Ghana country manager Patrick Stephenson has called for a state-led minerals analytical unit capable of independent profitability modelling and project valuation. Without it, the government negotiates from the same information deficit in every future contract.
The fourth player
Published research by an academic specialising in justice and equity in critical minerals governance adds a dimension that the royalties debate has largely ignored. The study, which examined Ghana’s emerging lithium sector through the lens of social licence to operate, finds that three governance failures are already generating friction before the mine has opened: delays in legal and regulatory processes that leave communities in legal limbo over their land; exclusion from decisions about land access, water use and environmental safeguards; and inadequate or opaque compensation that communities experience as dispossession rather than negotiation.
The argument is not that communities oppose development. The research is explicit that when communities are engaged early and meaningfully, they are more likely to see mining as a negotiated partnership than an imposed extraction. The problem in Ghana’s lithium communities is that the engagement has been uneven and the communication about what the project means for land access and livelihoods has been unclear. That generates grievances that accumulate, and accumulated grievances in mining communities tend to resolve themselves through the only tools communities have: protests, legal challenges, and production blockages.
The supply chain implication is direct. Global battery manufacturers and governments relying on Ghanaian spodumene concentrate to hit EV production targets cannot warehouse the social risk sitting inside the Ewoyaa contract. A single sustained community blockade can shut a mine. A legal challenge to land compensation can freeze construction. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are the standard operating mechanism through which mining communities in the global south exercise the leverage that the formal negotiating process denied them. The researcher’s conclusion is measured but unambiguous: local participation is a practical risk management tool, not a symbolic gesture. In a world where a single protest can disrupt global supply chains, community consent is a supply chain variable.
What Ghana’s contract includes, and what it doesn’t
The Ewoyaa lease does include a Community Development Fund set at 1 percent of project revenue. Ghana’s broader Green Minerals Policy, approved in 2024, limits raw lithium exports and pushes for domestic processing, with a future chemical plant to convert spodumene into lithium carbonate for direct battery supply chain integration. Local employment targets of 70 percent have been set, tied to training and apprenticeship requirements. These are meaningful provisions. The gap, as the research identifies, is between what the contract says and what the communities around Ewoyaa have been told about how it will work in practice. Land restriction communications have been inconsistent. Compensation timelines are unclear. The consultation process that preceded the lease did not produce the kind of durable community buy-in that insulates projects from future disruption.
Ghana’s government has acknowledged the governance challenge. Its mining law reform agenda includes direct community revenue sharing and shorter licence tenures to improve accountability. Whether those reforms arrive before the first ground is broken at Ewoyaa, and whether they are communicated to the affected communities with enough specificity to shift perception from dispossession to participation, is the variable that will determine whether Ghana’s first lithium project runs smoothly or spends its early years managing social conflict instead of producing concentrate.
Bigger Picture: Ghana’s lithium project is the benchmark for every critical mineral deal that follows it. "Lithium is Ghana’s first green mineral and will set the benchmark for future critical mineral agreements," opposition lawmaker Kwaku Ampratwum-Sarpong said during the parliamentary renegotiation process. He was talking about fiscal terms. The research on social licence suggests the benchmark needs to include something harder to quantify and easier to ignore: whether the people whose land sits above the ore were genuinely part of the decision that determined what happens to it. Africa holds the minerals the world needs for the energy transition. The energy transition cannot happen on the old extraction terms, where communities are informed rather than consulted, compensated rather than included, and left to protest rather than participate. The supply chain risk is real. So is the opportunity to do it differently.
Source: The Conversation / Climate Home News / BISI
