The ongoing collapse of mineral prices on the international market, growing debt crisis and dwindling revenue to finance socio-economic development in African countries has refocused attention on how to optimally use the continent’s vast mineral sector through speedy implementation of the African Mining Vision (AMV).
The African Mining Vision seeks to foster a transparent, equitable and optimal exploitation of mineral resources to underpin broad-based sustainable growth and socio-economic development.
This sustainable growth should move away from a revenue first model of extractive-led development to that of mineral- focused, that places development front and center of the mineral value chain, including upstream, downstream and side stream opportunities for transforming the sector to an engine for structural transformation through industrialization and diversification.
African countries did not benefit from the boom and have experienced industrialisation as well as lack of progress in fiscal instruments, including illicit leakages.
Yet, seven years after African leaders adopted the AMV at their February 2009 Summit, very few countries have aligned their minerals policy to the reform agenda, which seeks to stimulate a paradigm shift in mineral resource governance.
However, these recent developments have ignited renewed efforts to move towards implementation of the AMV.
In 2015, the AMDC announced an AMV compact with the private sector.
Earlier this March, the AMDC hosted a technical workshop to draft an African Mineral Governance Framework to support the implementation and monitoring of the AMV.
It is against this backdrop that the African Union Commission (AUC) and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Uneca) convened a continent wide two-day high level round table on March 21-22, 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to further develop and refine the African Minerals Governance Framework (AMGF ) for the AMV.
The round table brought about 120 participants from various African governments, the AU, Uneca, AMDC, Pan African institutions and civil society.
The monitoring framework addressed all seven main pillars of the AMV, namely the fiscal regime and revenue management; geological and mineral information systems; building human and institutional capacity; artisan and small-scale mining; mineral sector governance; linkages, investment and diversification; and environment and social issues
Kenya has however failed to capitalise on the rich minerals it boasts of, such as the recently discovered oil in Turkana County.