Openwrt make cannot find libncurses.so / ncurses.h

I am trying to compile openwrt using nix-environments/envs/openwrt/shell.nix at 5856d556e000603d4d1dad8c9b55114a5e2cf315 · nix-community/nix-environments · GitHub

However when trying to build my image it complains with the following message:

Build dependency: Please install ncurses. (Missing libncurses.so or ncurses.h)                                                

However, ncurses is part of the shell environment. How can I make openwrt aware of it’s existence?