The Makuta ya Maendeleo consortium launches an interactive platform on provincial and local mining royalties
Press release
- Congo
- Local taxation
- Mining
Associated partners
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Makuta ya maendeleo
The Makuta ya Maendeleo consortium has launched an interactive platform devoted to disclosing how the mining royalty that companies pay to provinces and decentralised territorial entities (ETDs) is collected, distributed and allocated across the DRC. The tool publishes both the amounts owed to each province and ETD, as recorded in the mines pisions’ debit notes, and the amounts actually received. It features an interactive map locating the mining projects subject to the royalty and the beneficiary entities.
For Jean Pierre Okenda, head of Resource Matters’ Extractive Industries Department and a consortium member, the platform is meant to spur citizen participation and oversight along the whole chain of royalty collection and spending, so that these funds finally support community development in mining areas. It also allows beneficiary provinces and ETDs to publish data on the sums collected and how they are allocated, as required by Article 27 of Decree No. 22/20 of 13 May 2022. The initiative responds to a paradox: despite the country’s immense mineral wealth, mining has yet to deliver real social and economic progress for Congolese citizens, and especially for the communities affected by extraction.
The 2018 Mining Code did introduce three levers for local development, a royalty shared between the central government, the provinces and the ETDs (with a portion for the future-generations fund), mandatory community charters (cahiers de charges), and a levy of at least 0.3% of companies’ turnover. Their impact has nonetheless remained limited, held back by weak transparency, restricted access to data and insufficient citizen oversight; the most recent EITI figures on the royalty, tellingly, date back to June 2020. Having worked on these issues since 2019, the consortium presents the platform as a tool to advance transparency and accountability in the management of provincial and local royalties.