Throughout 2025, the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (The ICIR) pursued stories that held power to account and amplified voices often ignored. Our reporting spanned agriculture, health, education, governance, security, the environment, the economy, and human rights, with a strong focus on women, vulnerable communities, and the failures of public institutions.
From investigations into abandoned public projects, illicit mining, oil pollution, and violent conflicts, to data-driven reports, fact-checks, and explanatory journalism, The ICIR remained committed to evidence-based reporting in the public interest.
A hallmark of our 2025 coverage was the ICIR Terror Series, an expansive reporting project documenting the human cost and systemic failures surrounding violent extremism and insecurity across Nigeria. The Terror Series remains a vital resource for understanding the complexities of terrorism and armed conflict in the country.
As we enter 2026, The ICIR is deepening this commitment. We intend to do more investigations, more data journalism, more fact-checks, and more accountability reporting, strengthening transparency, defending press freedom, and ensuring that stories that matter most to Nigerians are told, documented, and acted upon.
Here is a snapshot of our reporting.
Agriculture
- In Anambra, women farmers with disabilities are treated unfairly, denied agricultural inputs
- Rising waters, empty plates: Concerns as flooding poses food insecurity in Bauchi
- ‘Sack Farming’ initiative offers lifeline to women with disabilities in Nasarawa
- How input distribution system worsens plight of Nasarawa women farmers
- Harvest amid hardship: Full barns, empty pockets
Business & economy
- Extortion: How PoS operators, filling stations, traders, collude to rip off consumers
- Residents groan, offices shut, as FG, Osun State lock horns over LG funds
- Housing affordability: Low pay, high rents shut out Abuja journalists
- Niger community wallows in pain, counts losses amid illegal gold mining
- Port Harcourt Refinery: Skeletal operations persist months after commissioning
- Inside Idiroko smuggling network: Customs, Police officers at the helm
- Smuggling hub: Saki-Benin border remains a thriving hotspot despite ban
- Beyond the flames: Uncovering the scars of Lagos market fires
Conflict & security
- Black Sunday: the hidden horror of Ayetoro Kiri Church attack
- Maga abduction: How terrorists breached security, spent two hours and walked away with schoolgirls
- Back to the trenches: Ex-Boko Haram commanders, others reveal terrorists brutal comeback in North-East
- Abandoned and unsafe: government neglect fuels maternal deaths, sexual violence in Plateau community
- Communities under threat as armed men terrorise Kwara South
- Inside Benue communities trapped in vicious cycle of violence
- Ticking time bomb: Cross River’s Belegete border community remains unsecured two years after Ambazonia rebel invasion
- Sex for food: hunger fuels exploitation of female IDPs in Niger State
Infographics & data reports
- Despite aggressive tactics, EFCC secures low convictions in 5 years
- How many more? Tinubu frequent trips to France raise eyebrows
- In Enugu, cut-throat fees by agents, lawyers, landlords deepen housing crisis
- Inside lives of victims rendered orphans, widows by bloodbath on Plateau communities
- Airstrike cover-up: Katsina government helped Nigerian Air Force conceal civilian deaths
Education
- EXCLUSIVE: UNICAL knew admissions exceeded quota, went ahead anyway – sources reveal in Dental School crisis
- Oga Lecturer: how a digital platform is redefining sexual harassment fight on campus
- Power play: The untold story of Chukwu’s emergence as Admiralty University VC
- Two years under Tinubu: Students struggle with soaring fees despite NELFund lifeline
- NBTE Executive Secretary under fire over multimillion naira fraud allegation
- Questions linger as Sokoto government fails to account for N600 million project funds
- Sexual harassment persists at BUK despite strict policy
Environment & climate change
- Vanishing villages: Atlantic Ocean is swallowing Ondo coastal communities
- Anambra communities count losses after abandoned erosion control projects
- Black Gold, bleak future: Rivers communities on the edge despite hosting NNPCL oil wells
- Despite ban, illegal logging ravages Cross River’s last rainforest
- Farming activities crippled as gas flaring takes toll on Edo community
- Lead poisoning outbreak looms in Benue, as illegal mining becomes the ‘new farm’
- Toxic legacy: heavy metal poisoning takes toll on Zamfara children after MSF exit
- Abuja communities choke on trash as authorities fail to act
- Unhygienic conditions, poor sanitation, put Lagos residents at risk of cholera epidemic
- Grazing as usual: Despite Wike threats, cows continue to roam Abuja streets
- Plateau government turns a blind eye as climate disasters ravage communities
- Gog, Magog: Quarrying activities threaten Plateau ‘sacred rocks’
- Peaks of beauty, valleys of anguish: Inside the dark side of Mambilla Plateau
- Buried alive: The horrific toll of coal mining on Kogi’s underage children
- Outcry as Oando pipeline spills wreak havoc on Bayelsa communities
Fact-check investigations
- [EXPLAINER] What are the requirements, procedures for creating new states in Nigeria?
- ‘Undress her’: how generative AI tools enable violation of human rights
- How disinformation actors propagate divisive narratives on X
- FG makes false completion claims over Akwa Ibom Highway project
- AI assisted Ponzi schemes: How Meta, YouTube’s regulatory lapses enable scammers smile to banks
Health
- ‘If condoms, toilet paper are free, why not pads?’ Advocates ask, as period poverty hits Nigerian girls
- Beyond the baby blues: When motherhood meets mental health in Nigeria
- Fighting drug dependency in Nigeria, where laws punish instead of help
- From addiction to protection: An ex- cop’s journey to rehabilitation
- Shattered lives, rebuilt dreams: Drug abuse survivors share their journey to recovery
- When treatment fails: What to know about drug resistance in Nigeria
- Women displacement takes toll on maternal health in Benue
- Free but unreachable: Why persons with disabilities still struggle for healthcare in Anambra
- Maternal health gap: Niger communities rely on untrained Traditional Birth Attendants
- Free maternal healthcare in Niger State falters under fund delays, cultural barriers, and administrative gaps
- Flushed: Ekiti communities convert EU-funded toilets into eateries, barbing salons
- Female inmates in Nigeria struggle with menstrual hygiene amid neglect
- In Kano, mental patients patronise traditional healers despite government’s ban
- In Kano, rising food prices fuel malnutrition crisis among nursing mothers, children
Human rights
- Bruises, blood, legal costs: Plight of The ICIR at the frontlines of accountability reporting
- Movie makers, foreign religion threatening Isese, a religion with roots in Yorubaland
- Rejected at birth: Inside story of Abuja infanticide survivors
- Begging without borders: Security concerns as foreign beggars are ‘smuggled’ into Abuja in trucks
- In Kwara, police brutality persists, young lives cut short despite reform claims
- Lamurde shooting: How military silenced unarmed protesting women
- Nigerian courts impose millions of naira as bail money, but where does it end up?
Press freedom
- Breaking the silence: Escalating crisis of impunity against journalists in Nigeria
- Clampdown on CrossRiverWatch threatens accountability reporting in Cross River
- Detained, assaulted: Inside journalists harrowing encounters with security agents in Kaduna
- Price for exposing corruption: Kwara newsroom under legal siege
- World Democracy Day: Calls for home-tailored democracy grow amid criticisms of western style
- [EXPLAINER] What does a State of Emergency entail in Nigeria?
- International Day of Friendship: the power of meaningful bond
News analysis
- [UPDATED] Five institutions named after Tinubu in less than 2 years sparks debate about legality
- How local governments can foster grassroots development in Nigeria
- Aso Rock Game of Thrones: Is Tinubu planning to dump Shettima as running mate in 2027?
- Rivers unending political turbulence: Is Governor Fubara on the firing line?
- Kidnappings, attacks: Is Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city under siege?
- Beyond federal allocations: Inside NEITI’s new policy blueprint
- ‘Bow and Go’: How Uche Nnaji’s certificate scandal mirrors lawmakers, SSS failures over the years
- [EXCLUSIVE] Concerns over President Tinubu’s health as he misses key state functions, Presidency dismisses rumours
Others
- [EXCLUSIVE]: National Librarian, Anunobi faces probe over procurement, recruitment fraud
- Fatal scooping: Untold story of Niger petrol tanker tragedies
- In Kaduna, 20 communities cut off as 4-decade old bridge built by Shagari collapses
- In Sokoto communities, IDPs in dire straits as aid cuts hit hard
- Outrage, pains as survivors of Offa blast recall agonising experiences
- Power, politics, and polls: Inside Nigeria’s troubled local government elections
- Powerless: Inside Apara, Osun town 22-year struggle in darkness
- Shareholders demand accountability as PZ Cussons aborts NGX delisting plans
- After gulping nearly N1bn, Taraba dams abandoned, communities suffer
- EXPOSED: Petroleum Institute Finance Director fingered in multimillion naira fake National Assembly visits
- EXPOSED: Immigration officers resort to black markets for ID cards despite multibillion naira technology centre
- Paid but no licence: Nigerian drivers trapped in FRSC broken system
- Police hound whistleblower after exposing payroll racket
- Regulatory failure fuels avoidable building collapse tragedies in Lagos