West Africans attend workshop on Mining

A two-day capacity building workshop on the continental Africa Mining Vision (AMV) and the related ECOWAS Minerals Development Policy (EMDP) opened in Accra on Monday.

Forty representatives from civil society organizations, labour unions, women organizations, media and other stakeholders are attending the workshop, which is designed to expand and deepen participants’ understanding of the AMV and EMDP’s objectives and their implications.

It is also to support engagement with ECOWAS to harmonise the goals of the AMV and the EMDP and the envisioned harmonized regional code, as well as to strengthen collaboration and networking among a diversified range of non-state actors and organizations for advocacy on the AMV and EMDP.

The workshop is organised by Third World Network Africa (TWN-Africa) with support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).

Speaking at the workshop, Dr Yao Graham, Coordinator of TWN, said the workshop was taking place on the backdrop of realization by the continent that national development benefits of mining were not enough.

This, he said, had led to a shift to emerging patterns of policy change in which most governments were now engaged in the renegotiation of mining contracts and signing onto the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative to enhance the transparency of revenue flows in the sector.

He said despite the achievements, most African countries had shied away from signing International Labour Organisation Convention 176, which relates to the plight of mining workers.

Dr Graham called for collaboration and a collective voice, to ensure that the frameworks were implemented to enhance the benefits of mining to the people.

At the heart of the AMV is the creation of circumstances that support a “transparent, equitable and optimal exploitation of [Africa’s] mineral resources to underpin broad-based sustainable growth and socio-economic development”.

The AMV, in effect, proposes a paradigm shift away from a model of extractive resource exploitation based on a high dependency on international export markets that have proven incapable of delivering socio-economic development to Africa.

Through targeted policy reforms, the AMV seeks to address the structural flaws of a model inherited from the colonial era, characterized by the "enclaved, mono-sectoral nature of mining activities, the weakened institutional capacity and profoundly asymmetrical relations between the negotiating capacity of governments and companies.

The AMV and EMDP exemplify the growing convergence between the positions of critical voices in African society and new official policy directions. The convergence is partially expressed in the AMV and EMDP policy making processes. The role of CSOs in these processes has grown over time. For example, CSOs actors had a strong voice in the 2011 AU Ministerial which approved the AMV Action Plan.

Specific topics to be treated at the ongoing workshop include essential tenets of the mining reform agenda, its challenges and proposed remedies for realizing the AMV and EMDP; mining and economic transformation and the role of the state; and how ongoing reforms address labour as well as artisanal miners, human rights concerns and communities’ issues.