Experts from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) convened last week in Lagos to finalize the review of the Draft Revised ECOWAS Mineral Development Policy (Revised EMDP, 2024). This third and potentially final National Experts Review Meeting, held from November 10th to 15th, brought together senior officials from Member States’ mineral resources ministries and the ECOWAS Federation of Chamber of Mines (EFEDCOM).
The objective was to overhaul a twelve-year-old framework and harmonize the region’s approach to its vast mineral wealth, ensuring its development aligns with the aspirational African Mining Vision and the broader goals of sustainable, integrated growth.
The necessity for this deep policy revision is rooted in the dynamic realities of the global extractive sector and the stark disconnect between Africa’s mineral endowment and its development metrics. For too long, the narrative across West Africa has been one of high-volume extraction yielding low local benefit.
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The original 2012 policy was a foundational step toward operationalizing Article 31 of the Revised ECOWAS Treaty, which mandates the coordination of natural resource policies. However, the intervening decade has seen tectonic shifts in mineral demand, particularly for energy transition minerals like lithium, cobalt, and graphite, and a growing continental consensus that raw export models are economically insufficient and environmentally disastrous.
Consider the reality on the ground: countries like Ghana and Mali are among the continent’s largest gold producers, yet the linkages between the mining sector and the rest of the national economy remain weak. Gold alone contributed over 90% of Ghana’s total mineral revenue in 2022, but the lion’s share of value addition, smelting, refining, and manufacturing, happens offshore.
A revised policy framework must address this leakage by creating enforceable mechanisms for local content development, compelling companies to invest in domestic processing facilities and skills transfer. For the region to capture more than the minimal rent from its resources, the policy needs to be a blueprint for transitioning from mere extraction to value-chain integration.
The practical consequence of a fragmented policy environment is stark. Transnational companies often navigate a patchwork of national regulations, sometimes leading to a ‘race to the bottom’ where environmental and social safeguards are relaxed to attract investment. In the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector, which supports millions of livelihoods, uncoordinated policies have led to widespread environmental degradation, including mercury contamination of water sources, a crisis seen acutely in the gold-rich areas of Burkina Faso and Niger.
A harmonized regional policy, built on principles of the African Mining Vision, offers a unified front. It allows ECOWAS nations to collectively negotiate better fiscal terms, enforce stricter environmental governance, and leverage regional infrastructure for shared processing plants, thereby optimizing costs and reducing the footprint of individual operations.
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This integration is clear; it’s about tangible infrastructure and finance. For instance, harmonizing tax and royalty regimes across the 15-member bloc could create a more predictable investment climate than a single-country policy, reducing perceived risk and potentially attracting patient capital necessary for building large-scale regional refineries or mineral processing hubs.
The policy revision must therefore be inextricably linked to ECOWAS Vision 2050, which champions regional economic integration. It means looking at the logistics corridor from the mining sites in the interior, like those in Guinea (bauxite/iron ore), to the ports on the coast, not as isolated national projects, but as a regional economic artery.
The discussions in Lagos were focused on ensuring that the revised policy is not merely a document of good intentions but a practical implementation matrix. This means embedding principles that directly tackle the sustainability triad: economic viability, environmental protection, and social equity.
Economically, it must shift the balance of power toward local value creation. Environmentally, it must establish common, high-bar standards for mine closure, rehabilitation, and water management, overriding any national policy that falls short. And socially, it must explicitly outline how revenues will be transparently managed and shared with mining communities, mitigating the recurring cycle of resource-based conflict and grievance seen in parts of the sub-region.
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