ICMM - International Council on Mining & Metals

CASE STUDY

Making mining count in Ghana: case study

In late 2004, Ghana was identified by participants of a global multi-stakeholder workshop held in London as a country that had largely been successful in avoiding the ‘resource curse’. Ghana was selected for in-country work to identify the success factors that might explain this outcome.

Work began in 2005 to assess the positive and negative impacts of mining both at the national level and also at the project level around the Obuasi mine of AngloGold Ashanti. 

The research was conducted using an analytical framework and tools developed in Phase 1 of the initiative. Phase 2 focused not just on understanding mining’s impact in Ghana, but also in three other countries – Tanzania, Chile and Peru.

The main conclusions of this research in Ghana can be found in the country case study report on Ghana, and summarized in Spotlight 07.

A resurgence of mining investment in the country from the mid 1980s had made an important contribution to turning around the national economy and also to reducing poverty at both national and local levels. Using the Ghanaian Living Standards Surveys for 1991-1999, income poverty fell from 52% to 40%. In the four mining districts, poverty levels were lower than the remaining 112 districts in Ghana, outside of Accra.

But some significant challenges were also pinpointed – for example perceptions among local communities in the Obuasi area that they were receiving insufficient economic benefits from the mines, conflicts over land use and property rights, environmental damage and concerns, conflicts between large-scale and artisanal mining, lack of transparency around mining revenues allocated at the local level.

The research also suggested room for improvement in the manner in which the companies were managing and delivering their broader economic contribution – as well as in governance and the effectiveness of public institutions, particularly at the regional and local levels.

When the findings from the Phase 2 country case studies were taken together (see Synthesis Report), six broad areas for partnerships or institutional development were identified, which appeared to hold the greatest potential for enhancing the socio-economic returns from mining. It was on these six areas that attention was in turn focused in Phase 3.

• Enhanced management of mineral revenues
• Enhanced social and economic development in mining areas
• Poverty reduction in mining areas
• Increased local content used by mining projects
• Strengthened local and regional development planning
• Improved mechanisms for disputes resolution

A core finding across all four countries studied in Phase 2 was that more collaborative action and stronger partnerships between mining companies, government, civil society organizations and donors are needed to unlock the full potential benefits of mineral wealth.

The objective of Phase 3 in Ghana, which began in late 2007, was to explore and develop channels through which this could be achieved in practice. Due to new and large investments in Ghana since the Phase 2 case-study, the project-level assessment in Phase 3 was also extended to include the mining activities of Gold Fields Ghana, mainly in the Tarkwa area, and also Newmont Ghana in the Ahafo region, in addition to the work of Anglo Gold Ashanti in both Obuasi and Tarkwa.  This included a ‘mapping’ exercise which identified relevant existing initiatives and multi-stakeholder partnerships against the six priority areas, provided an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of current collaborations, and helped pinpoint those areas most in need of discussion and attention.

One output of this exercise was an innovative on-line database designed to support the sharing of good practices going forward (Ghana Mining Socioeconomic Database).

Results of the field work, together with the mapping exercise, were presented at a workshop held in Accra in February 2008, co-hosted by ICMM and the Ghanaian government and supported by the Ghanaian chamber of mines. This event convened an unprecedented range of stakeholder groups and sought to catalyze action around a set of clear priorities determined by workshop participants on ways to improve mining’s contribution to socio-economic development (see minutes of the workshop). Progress on all the agreed action points is expected to be reviewed in a follow-up workshop in 9-12 months’ time.