An Inclusive Growth Approach to Promote Community Resilience

This Issues Brief offers steps companies can take to seed resilient futures for their businesses and communities: 

1. Proactively identify inclusive opportunities that generate meaningful impact. This is related to communities’ social and environmental priorities, especially employment. Issues Brief #3 suggests ways to identify opportunities related to ancillary services, transport corridors and value chains that move beyond those directly generated by the mining company. The most promising opportunities are those that have real market potential, identified off-taker partners, external sources of finance, and above all, align with community objectives and resources.  

2. Rethink the role of the mining company and its relationships with other partners. In order to catalyse development in ways that reduce community dependence on the mine and enable a sustainable exit after mine closure. In the various approaches reviewed, the key consideration is how to structure, manage and finance a portfolio of the most promising opportunities while building local capacity. One promising approach involves being a seed supporter of Project Development Facilities (PDFs) that can finance local entrepreneurs to scale businesses and attract capital in the long term. By structuring community resilience investment through a facility, mining companies can move from being philanthropists to impact investors, while ensuring their exit does not mean an end to progress.  

3. Unlock capital from other stakeholders to ensure programme success, facility implementation and achievement of enduring economic and environmental outcomes. The challenge is to structure commercial and financing vehicles with the appropriate governance needed to attract other sources of finance, whether government or private.  

4. Manage change to ensure accountability and benefit for diverse stakeholders and investors. The key is to align all actors, especially the community, around shared and measurable objectives and to transparently communicate results to all actors. The report suggests the System Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecards as helpful tools.  

5. Putting these steps together requires a catalyst. This can take many forms, however, it is integral to effectively unite stakeholders and organise capital around promising opportunities. Issues Brief #3 details structures ranging from in-house units to third parties that can help miners action the inclusive growth approach.