* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Spotlight on Africa's resources boom
The next time you flick on the kitchen light, think of this. In Tanzania, fewer than one household in five has access to mains electricity. In Uganda, the figure's closer to just one in 10!
For any journalist, figures like these are natural story pegs. For a journalist reporting on oil, gas or minerals, they are figures that could, or perhaps should, launch a public debate.
The nature of that debate is one of the questions at the heart of an evolving programme on extractive industry reporting that 28 journalists from Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana took part in during a 10-day workship in the Tanzanian commercial capital of Dar es Salaam.
«In their dealings with the global extractive industries, national governments frequently fail to get full value for their resources, » Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in Escaping the Resource Curse (Humphreys, Sachs, Stiglitz, Revenue Watch Institute 2007).
Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania are all sitting on commercially exploitable reserves of oil, gas and minerals, which represent huge potential sources of wealth for their citizens.
The workshop was organised by Revenue Watch with help from the Thomson Reuters Foundation and is part of a programme launched in 2011 to give journalists the knowledge and skills to stimulate and feed public debate on how their country can make the most of its natural resources.
Fast cars and champagne?
The response of public and politicians in Britain and in the United States to the use of chemical weapons in Syria demonstrates that public debates can change policy. In both debates, the role of the media was key.
Oil, gas or minerals are finite resources like inherited wealth or a win on the lottery. Sell your inheritance for less than it's worth or spend the cash from your lottery win on fast cars and champagne and you end up with nothing.
The task of any journalist keen to investigate whether their country extracts real value from its mineral wealth is complicated by confidentiality clauses in contracts as well as a lack of knowledge or of access to authoritative sources.
Revenue Watch works closely with training partners in each country. Participants attend two workshops with access to mentoring and reporting grants. The programme includes two or three reporting trips and access to specialist speakers or potential news makers.
Digging deeper …
The Dar es Salaam workshop, which ran from July 24 to August 2, 2013, was a first step towards understanding how governments earn and spend revenue from minerals, and how they can negotiate better deals with companies experienced in the art of tax avoidance or, as it's officially referred to, ' tax optimisation '.
Visits to communities surrounding a gold mine in Geita or mines run by small-scale miners searching for Tanzanite, a rare gemstone near Arusha, highlighted a lack of sustainable development.
The next step for the participants, in their second workshop or beyond, will be digging deeper, understanding what is happening in their respective countries and investigating whether their governments get a fair price for their natural resources, and how they plan to invest the money.
Between now and then, the group will be working closely with Revenue Watch's local partners - the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME) in Uganda, PenPlusBytes in Ghana, the Journalists' Environmental Association of Tanzania (JET) and Abdallah Katunzi of the University of Dar es Salaam's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Post Scriptum : Authoritative sources come in all shapes and sizes, and in various formats. As Abdallah reminded participants during the first workshop, if you have a story you want to tell, documentary evidence, such as a book, is a perfectly acceptable source … particularly if you leave your notes on a bus or, as I did, in my hotel room!
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
