AFRICA

Eastern and Southern Africa Meeting

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8 – 11 May. Maputo, Mozambique.

We, as coalition members of Publish What You Pay from 12 Eastern and Southern African countries, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, met under the auspices of Publish What You Pay (PWYP), on the theme of moving from transparency to accountability.

Click here to download a copy of the report Piping Profits

Ten of the world’s most powerful oil, gas and mining companies own 6,038 subsidiaries and over a third of them are based in secrecy jurisdictions, a new Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Norway report today reveals.

Secrecy jurisdictions facilitate illicit financial flows, to which the developing world loses US$1 trillion a year.

Today for the first time, the G8 endorsed mandatory disclosure of extractive industry payments to governments.

Activists Deliver Letter to David Cameron from 200 Ugandans

Ugandan activists have delivered a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, calling on the UK Government to ‘end the resource curse’ by supporting greater transparency in the oil industry. The letter was organised by the Publish What You Pay Coalition and signed by over 200 civil society activists from Uganda.

The Publish What You Pay coalition strongly welcomes the announcement by the UK Government that it will push for the implementation of oil, gas and mining transparency laws in the EU. If introduced, such laws would require that companies listed in the EU publish what they pay to governments for the extraction of minerals around the world. This will improve revenue transparency, helping to eradicate the corruption that has blighted some mineral rich states and improve the lives of millions of people in the developing world.

I am Chairperson of Publish What You Pay Uganda and work for an organisation called Global Rights Alert. In Uganda we are striving to ensure that the recently discovered oil in our country helps us fight poverty, disease and develop economically.

Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Cameroon

Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Cameroon is entering its sixth year with renewed vigor in its campaign for the responsible management of Cameroon’s subsoil resources. The coalition was launched in 2005 during a regional PWYP workshop in Yaoundé. After an enthusiastic start, PWYP Cameroon worked hard to meet the challenges that working as a coalition can bring. Eliminating interpersonal conflicts, encouraging information sharing and establishing a plan of action based on consensus were all part of this learning process. With the help of different capacity building programs and with support from the PWYP Africa Coordinator, the coalition was able to integrate the various structures, expertise and priorities of different members, without undermining their mandate or identity as individual organisations.

We, representatives of Publish What You Pay (PWYP) francophone African coalitions meeting in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) from 29 January to 2 February 2010 at the PWYP Africa Francophone Workshop on the theme of “Strengthening the PWYP campaign and advocacy for greater transparency and accountability in the management of natural resources in Francophone Africa”:

We, members of Publish What You Pay (PWYP)* Africa, thank the Catholic Church for its commitment to promote the equitable management of natural resource wealth in Africa.

We commend the Church for continuing to place the issue of the resource curse and its repercussions at the centre of its discussions and deliberations on Africa.

We are representatives of Southern African civil society organisations that are members of the Publish What You Pay (PWYP)* global coalition, which campaigns for the transparent and accountable management of oil, gas and mining revenues. We welcome the recent Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Heads of State Summit in Kinshasa, and we congratulate the Democratic Republic of Congo on being granted chairmanship of the SADC for a year.

The SADC region has abundant mineral resources which can assist in accelerating the economic and social development and growth of the region.