Minserv (2021) Confidential Research Report to the World Bank
Executive Summary:
The world is consuming mineral products at an ever-increasing rate. Its mineral potential makes Africa a good candidate for increasing its contribution to future mineral supply. However, this opportunity requires policy innovation because there are multiple issues to manage amidst first, a changing extractives landscape as the sector embraces technology, and second, governments on the continent revisit their policies to extract more benefit. Converting comparative advantage into future benefit requires countries to make policy choices today. Countries have different histories, legacies and are at different stages of development, making it impossible to develop generic policy for all African states. For this reason, this paper proposes policy choices, which must be considered and applied after considering local context and sovereignty issues. Fourth industrial revolution or 4IR technologies allow individual citizens, companies and governments to collect data on anything or anyone, but ‘more’ is not the solution – ‘better’ is the goal. This fundamental human-centric shift is also visible in policy-making. The policies of the 20th century were about attracting more investment to enable more company profit and more country growth. In a ‘less-is-more’ scenario, governments must take care not to keep on adding policy instruments to the mix, but rather re-imagine and align existing policy intents with an unavoidable technology-intensive future. One can use the analogy of solving a Rubik Cube, i.e. to align the colors (policy instruments clustered under themes) until the puzzle is solved and without increasing the number of cube-lets in the cubic.
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