GoSL Online Repository - Transparency of Payments in the Sierra Leone minerals sector

Add a Comment

Comment by Aasmund Andersen on July 19, 2011 at 13:18

Thanks for your feedback, Cindy!

The GoSL Online Repository is currently only available for stakeholders in the Mining Working Group in Sierra Leone, but is planned to be launched formally in November. The data is fed directly from the administrative system for managing mineral rights, and it therefore contains every single payment made in relation to a mining license (license fees, royalties, export tax, conservation fund, community development fund etc.), including for artisanal licenses (license and monitoring fees, rehabilitation fees). We are currently working on integrating the mineral rights administration system with the payments system of the National Revenue Authority.

 

The repository is aimed to serve as a basis for EITI validation of government-received payments, but also to provide broader transparency and better enforce compliance.  There are no plans for including socio-economic indicators, and I do not think this should be the purpose of the system; our focus is to help the government effectively use these administrative systems, which will produce more data to the public, and also enable your project i.e. to have more data to show. I discussed this with one of your colleagues (James Duncan). Hopefully we can work together on this once the government have decided to make the data public.

 

The system is designed to plug into any mining cadastre system the government already use. I have not be able to show this to the mines staff in Ghana yet, but hopefully soon.

 

Comment by Cindy Kroon on July 16, 2011 at 17:02

Hi Aasmund, this looks really good! If I understand it correctly it is accessible to the general public, right? At the World Bank Institute we've been working on a mapping of the extractives sector in Ghana, aiming to locate the mines and wells, but overlapping that with socio-economic data for planning purposes. It also includes data on EITI and links to contracts. We are expecting more data from the chamber of mines on specific company data per mine. What is the status of your project? Would there be an interest to expand it to include socio-economic data? Here's the link (works best in firefox) http://maps.worldbank.org/extractives/afr/ghana (you can select different base maps, extractives, mines, ores, oil). You can find the legend in the bottom right corner. Best, Cindy