Pact Speaks at the Conflict Minerals Forum

On 12 May 2010, Pact’s Yves Bawa spoke at the Conflict Minerals Forum to an audience of leading companies, investors and civil society organizations interested in addressing the challenges of mineral sourcing from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bawa was a panelist at a session on Responsible Mining & Capacity Building Efforts, and discussed Pact’s recently-completed work conducting an artisanal mining study for PROMINES.

Since 2005, Pact has worked with mining companies, the DRC Ministry of Mines, artisanal miners, traders, and communities to try to improve the benefits that they can obtain from mining, and reduce its negative impacts. Based on this experience, Pact was contacted to design the ASM component of PROMINES. PROMINES is a technical assistance project of the World Bank, co-funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), to work with the DRC government to restructure the Congolese mining sector. Among its objectives, PROMINES aims to strengthen the capacity of the state to manage its mineral resources responsibly and transparently, and to promote sustainable development based on mining. With a budget of $90 million (USD) over five years, PROMINES includes the biggest fund for ASM ever.

Pact employed a “bottom-up” approach in conducting the PROMINES study, gathering information through multi-stakeholder workshops, individual interviews and visits to mine sites. Pact validated and analyzed recommendations, using them to create a framework for sequenced interventions to improve artisanal mining. The design phase has just finished and the mechanism for implementation is currently being developed.

For more information, read the Conflict Minerals Forum Issue Overview or view the slides from the PROMINES Study presentation from the Conflict Minerals Forum.

Photo: Yves Bawa, Project Manager, PROMINES Artisanal Mining Study