Project name: Powering a Just Energy Transition Green Minerals Challenge (JET Minerals Challenge)
Objectives: To provide an efficient and systematic tool to identify corruption risks and strengthen integrity and anti-corruption capabilities
Districts: Nationwide (Lusaka, Kasempa, Kalomo and Mansa) depending on mining companies
The growing global demand for minerals – driven by the uptake in clean energy technologies – is bringing about a new set of opportunities and challenges for the mining industry. The fast pace of the energy transition is heightening existing governance and corruption risks across the industry, especially in areas where governance is already weak, while also facilitating the emergence of new risks.
Ensuring the highest standards of business integrity within the companies that lead the mining operations is crucial to ensure a just and sustainable energy transition: mining companies have a key role to play!
However, efforts among mining companies to detect, prevent and address bribery and corruption risks are disparate and inadequate: some continue to facilitate their business interests through unethical conduct and undue influence, while others lack the capabilities to understand and identify corruption risks.
JET Minerals Challenge, which is being run by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), seeks to refine the existing innovative online tool entitled Responsible Mining Business Integrity (RMBI) Tool, making it specifically designed to address and understand risks associated with the energy transition and to implement it in five key jurisdictions: Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
What is the RMBI tool?
The RMBI tool has been developed, tested and refined in collaboration with companies and international mining governance institutions since 2020.
It is designed to be used by company staff such as country managers, anti-bribery and corruption managers or compliance staff within mining companies of any size.
With indicators selected from close to 40 international best practice standards and frameworks, the RMBI seeks to address and reduce corruption risks in three ways:
The results, shared privately with the companies only, are collated into a report that is designed to facilitate internal conversations and help raise awareness among different business units to strengthen business integrity.
How were the 5 countries of implementation selected?
Zambia and the other countries selected for the implementation of the project are instances of territories where the extraction of green minerals is occurring at an accelerated pace with an increasingly urgent need to introduce integrity mechanisms in the sector.
What is the project doing in practical terms?
The project seeks to engage and work closely with up to five companies of diverse size, in each country, including also where possible Chinese owned mining companies. The initial data collected from the tool will act as a baseline for integrity standards and corruption risks and will be used to produce evidence on both changes in integrity standards for companies and countries.
What is TI’s involvement?
TI chapters will play a key role in the implementation of the tool, by providing guidance in the rolling out of the assessment, and moderating final workshop to discuss insights from the report, targeting a diverse range of stakeholders (e.g., representatives from companies, government, and civil society).