Introduction
Processing of primary commodities has long been considered a bridge from dependence to industrialisation and economic development. It is also a fundamental precept of the IFA Foundation - one that steers how everything we propose and do is structured.
Any impartial study of mining, in Africa, soon starts to uncover the horror stories surrounding colonialism and exploitation - when digging a little deeper it also leads to explanations for much of the lack of any progress and real economic development since independence.
In most African countries, the newly independent states simply carried on where the colonial administration left off. The structures of production remained unchanged, as did the degree of agricultural and mining specialization, the extent of majority share foreign capital control, the continuing exploitation of the peasantry and the fact that urban minorities enjoyed privileged access to services, including health and education.
Unlike what has occurred in the mining countries of South America or Asia, in Africa the nationalization of mineral deposits is purely formal and local processing is minimally developed. Mining revenues are low and no African country has succeeded or even seriously attempted to increase them by an appropriate policy. Above all, there has been no co-ordination between the producing countries, which reduced to zero any chance of forestalling the control exercised by Western states and capital.
That is slowly beginning to change though - and what does give us cause to cheer is the trend seen now in a few countries toward asserting their sovereign rights of control over their own resources. Senegal now has at least agreements that require payments based on production of iron ore - rather than profit sharing deals of old with front companies that never declared profits. The Gambia has recently ejected a foreign mining company that "omitted" to declare precisely what it was reducing from the exported ore.
Not exactly a bridge to industrialisation and development - but certainly a first step toward one!
The Biofuel project this Foundation is involved with is an attempt to contribute something toward changing this situation. To make it all work within that precept of "building bridges" - we need iron, steel and a few other metals - all of which are abundant in the continent. In purely practical terms - little would be achieved in imparting the knowledge needed to clear the mystery around industrialisation, if we skipped the most basic industrial knowledge of all - that of taking iron ore from the ground and converting it into the materials required for the construction of such things as Generating sets and Tractors.
The supply chain to a pure green Biofuel, and its contribution to the economic development of Africa therefore starts with mining. Also fundamental to the success of this project, as a whole, is the learning and teaching of management skills along the whole chain. The study of Small Scale and Artisanal Mining in Africa, in the search for a starting point, has highlighted the fact the best run and managed of those mines are those run by women. Something that is consistent with experience in the rest of Africa and much of the so called third world - and also eerily reminiscent of the time when the west was industrialising - many cottage industries, craftsmen artisans and apprentices were effectively managed by the women of the household. For various reasons, best left to anthropologists and perhaps churches to explain, women were later disenfranchised as the west industrialised.
It is rapidly becoming obvious to us that the way forward for Africa has as much to do with empowering women as demystifying technology. The establishment of the small scale iron ore and processing operations needed by this project are the first concrete steps toward making it a reality - they are also the first steps toward setting the management of the whole directly in the hands of Africas women.
