The African Mining Legislation Atlas (AMLA) – an online platform focused on promoting accessibility and transparency in the mineral resources sector – aims to have all 53 countries in Africa represented on the platform by the end of this year.

“It is well known that one of the barriers to investment in the African resource sector is the absence of certainty about legal frameworks for investors trying to make decisions on whether to invest in a particular jurisdiction or not,” says University of Cape Town (UCT) mineral law in Africa research chair Professor Hanri Mostert, who explains how inaccessible information on these legal frameworks can be.

He adds that, in some countries, documents such as basic as mining statutes are either not freely available or only accessible if one physically visits the relevant State departments, which can be a major deterrent for international investors.

Apart from promoting transparency, accessibility and making resource investment decisions in Africa easier, the AMLA platform also aims to build indigenous capacity for the creation and implementation of sound legal frameworks and governance in the extractive sectors of various African countries.

Owing to this, law students from 17 universities in Africa have been gathering at UCT over the past two years to attend intensive multilingual training courses on the legal aspects of Africa’s mining sector and the legal skills necessary to better serve this sector.

“A big focus of the project is to enable African countries to use home-grown capacity to draft the laws that would benefit their populations and are aligned to the overall policy objectives of their elected governments,” he explains.

Moreover, Mostert indicates that the resource laws of many African countries still have colonial origins and cannot serve modern African soci- eties optimally. Also, there is a real need for laws in African countries to take into account the realities of a modern market economy and current mining techniques, as well as the value systems of the jurisdictions that must be served by these laws.

Currently, the AMLA has the basic laws of 28 African countries loaded onto the online database, while one of the next phases in the AMLA initiative will be to roll out a Guiding Template that policymakers across the continent can use either to draft their resource laws from scratch or amend them to take into account present-day realities in the sector.

“We hope to unveil a zero draft of the Guiding Template by the end of this year, while further drafting will be done in consultation with the project partners early next year,” Mostert states.

Confident of the value-add of the initiative, he points out that the time is right for such an initiative, as, at the moment, ‘doom and gloom’ seem to dominate debate about African mineral extraction, owing to the drop in commodity prices. Also, an economic slump provides a window of opportunity for many African countries to consolidate and improve the legal frameworks governing extractive enterprises.

“This will enable them to be well prepared to draw more benefit from the resource sector when the economic tide turns again. Ideally, you want a consolidated resource law framework that deals with extraction consistently, whether it involves base or precious minerals as solids, liquids or gas,” he concludes.