Staff at The University of Queensland’s Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining have created a video on mining in Sierra Leone, Africa that has become the frontrunner in an international video competition.
The video, titled Cleaning up Diamond Legacies – Transparency in Sierra Leone, details the challenges for the Sierra Leonean Government in protecting the country’s natural resources and harnessing the development potential of mining.
It is currently leading in a public voting contest against two other semi-finalists in the video competition hosted by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).
The video gives insight into how international standards such as the EITI can provide support for these challenges and is based on research conducted collaboratively between the UQ Sustainable Minerals Institute’s (SMI) Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining (CSRM) and the Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation (CMLR).
As part of the initial research, SMI’s Dr Daniel Franks and Dr Peter Erskine travelled to Sierra Leone and visited five industrial and three small-scale mines as part of a tour organised by the Sierra Leone Environmental Protection Agency.
Dr Franks and Dr Erskine found that while initial rehabilitation projects were experiencing success, the challenge to Sierra Leone’s management of mining development lay in addressing liabilities left over from the blood diamond mining trade that supported the country’s decade-long war.
“One of the main challenges is that the war created a situation where all of the responsibilities for the liabilities left from mining in the past don’t have an owner,” Dr Franks said.
“[There are] no longer people who are responsible for cleaning up the mess of old mine sites. The new mine sites have new contracts, new capital, new owners, and in negotiating those new contracts Sierra Leone is not able to ask those new owners to take on those liabilities,” he said.
The research was funded through AusAID’s International Mining for Development Centre (IM4DC).
Cleaning up Diamond Legacies – Transparency in Sierra Leone emphasises the need for governments to adopt policies of revenue payment transparency in the extractive industries in order to improve accountability in the sector and promote responsible engagement with communities and the environment.
Entrants in the video competition are competing to be showcased at the EITI Global conference in Sydney in May and receive the EITI Chair Award.
To watch the video or place a vote please click here
Media: James Morrell, j.morrell1@uq.edu.au or 0405 432 162
