Eritrea: an emerging powerhouse in African mining?

Eritrea possesses one of the fastest growing mining sectors in Africa. Eritrea’s mining approach represents a robust deployment of public-private and public-public partnerships anchored on proportional distribution of ownership rights between the State of Eritrea through its mining entity, the Eritrean National Mining Corporation (ENAMCO), and numerous international mining companies. This paper provides an overview of the Eritrean mining sector with a view to highlighting some of the key lessons for mining in Africa (and emerging markets elsewhere in the Global South) that can be drawn from Eritrea’s nascent and evolving experience with mining. The paper discusses mining exploration, mining law, the operation and governance of mining sites, equitable benefit sharing with communities in the vicinity of mining projects, environmental and social programs accompanying the exploration, production, and termination of open-pit mining sites. The main thesis of the paper is that Eritrea’s approach to mining represents a successful case of a carefully managed state-led model in which the state has played a significant role in jumpstarting and governing various mining partnerships and have done so in an incremental, pragmatic, autonomous but cautiously interdependent fashion.