Central Africa is one of the richest areas relating to geological resources on the continent. Several national mining visions and strategies conclude that mining, forestry and agriculture are the key industries for future economic development in the sub-region. Commodities distribution and stakeholders as well as their interrelationships have been comprehensively studied within the physical-geography AFRASO sub-project S1-C between 2013-2016 by manifold show cases in Cameroon and in Central African Republic. In July 2016, the third AFRASO documentary film will give a profound insight into living and working conditions of artisanal miners and the Asian influence. The film will be presented to the public during the third international AFRASO conference in Frankfurt in September 2016. The ongoing field mapping and stakeholder analysis within the sub-project highlights the increasing dominance of Asian actors in professional and artisanal mining in Central Africa. This will be used to set up a general stakeholder's model for the extractive sector.
During this project – which was consequently underpinned by the on-site fieldwork of a Cameroonian PhD candidate – it was found out that government owned and private Asian investors systematically gained more influence in this sector over the last 5–10 years. The other objective of the sub-project’s ongoing activities is to materialize these findings by organizing an “Afrasia Stakeholder and Commodities Conference” in Yaoundé in 2018 to focus on the general validity and to strengthen ownership of local actors, and finally, setting up an “Afrasian stakeholder’s model” to transform empirical AFRASO findings on an abstraction level.
Picture taken by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Runge
Picture taken by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Runge
Picture taken by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Runge