ResourceContracts.org

Since 2014, the ALSF has been supporting the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) in developing a website with a growing collection of publicly disclosed mining, oil and natural gas contracts that seeks to help resource-rich countries maximize public access to and better comprehension of their natural resource contracts. The portal gives support as a resource center that provides free, web-based practical guidance on natural resource contract transactions, including a template to assist in annotating contracts, key contract terms, laws, regulatory instruments, checklists, etc. Together with links to other useful resources on mining, oil and natural gas, the Project contributes to strengthening the legal expertise and negotiating capacity of African countries in the negotiation of complex commercial transactions in the extractive industries. Specifically, in total NRGI has published 671 new contract documents as of 30 June 2019, hereof 294 from African countries. During the reporting period NRGI piloted desktop research to identify projects and contracts which are connected. This was also to identify linkages between ResourceContracts.org and ResourceProjects.org data. As a result, NRGI discovered the following : i) 303 documents (or 15% of all documents) available on ResourceContracts.org have an associated project name; ii) 61 documents (or 3% of all documents) available on ResourceContracts.org can be linked to a project which has mandatory disclosure data available on ResourceProjects.org. Accordingly, the future development plans include adding a ResourceProjects.org link to ResourceContracts.org. Additionally, transitioning States have recently been the focus of the ALSF in order to develop as next phase a country level ResourceContracts.org website.