Examining the Research Gap in Indigenous Counselling Models for Nigerian Contexts

The dominant counselling theories applied in Nigerian practice are derived from Western psychological traditions that may insufficiently account for African philosophical, communal, and spiritual frameworks, and the systematic examination of this gap and the available indigenous alternative models is an important scholarly contribution to the counselling literature. This study systematically examined the research gap in indigenous or Afrocentric counselling models for Nigerian contexts. A scoping review methodology was employed, searching nine databases for publications from 2010 to 2024 addressing African-centred or indigenous counselling models with applicability to Nigeria. Sixty-three eligible publications were identified and thematically mapped against seven theoretical dimensions: communalism, Ubuntu philosophy, spirituality and religion, oral tradition in therapeutic communication, collectivist family systems, traditional healing integration, and colonial trauma. Comparison with the evidence base for standard Western counselling models applied in Nigeria revealed that indigenous model development research published in indexed journals is disproportionately scarce, accounting for fewer than 12 percent of the identified corpus. The scoping review identified three broad categories of indigenous model development: Afrocentric counselling adaptations, religiously informed therapeutic frameworks, and traditional healer collaboration models. Critical gaps included the absence of manualised indigenous counselling protocols, the scarcity of outcome evaluation research for indigenous approaches, and the near-complete neglect of North Nigerian (Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri) cultural therapeutic traditions. The study proposes a research agenda and a conceptual framework for developing and testing Nigerian indigenous counselling models.

Keywords: indigenous counselling, Afrocentric therapy, research gap, Nigeria, culturally informed practice