Minminas, Colombia’s Mining Ministry Obtains $30 Million USD IDB Loan To Modernize Procedures

Colombia ‘s mining and energy sector will strengthen the way it makes policy decisions and its administration of information for efficient services, as well as its controls and audit methods, with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

An IDB loan of $30 million for the Institutional Strengthening of the Mining and Energy Sector program is designed to improve transparency and efficiency.

This sector shows institutional weaknesses in generating, sharing and using information about mining and energy activities. These shortcomings limit the capacity of authorities to plan, control and offer services to the sector, and lower the levels of accountability toward citizens.

Colombia’s government, which has signed on to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), has identified transparency as the starting point for strengthening its institutional capacities, in line with the international experience of advanced countries that are rich in natural resources.

The principal beneficiary will be the Minminas: The Ministry of Mines and Energy and its related agencies.

Among the project’s goals is the design and implementation of a strategic command panel and a business intelligence module. It will also seek to redesign the institutional procedures at the National Mining Agency. And it will strengthen the Mining and Energy Planning Unit’s capacity for generating coordinated data that will allow the other institutions in the sector to improve their planning and delivery of information services.

To increase transparency, the project will seek to review and improve the information available in the controls module of the MapaRegalías platform, designed to visualize the incomes and investments financed with resources from extractive industries.

The loan will be for 15 years, with an interest rate based on LIBOR.

Cover photo: Minister of mines & Energy Tomás González, and Viceminister of Mines, Maria Isabel Ulloa, review the area of a mining accident in Amagá Antioquía. Image courtesy of Minminas.