Piloting a Digital Stakeholder Engagement Platform for Tanzania’s Mining Sector: Incident Tracking & Mobile Surveys

This report describes the methodology and findings of a digital stakeholder engagement platform for Tanzania’s mining sector, piloted by IPIS in October 2018. The pilot forms part of a project on ‘Mapping the socio-economic and human rights impact of mining in northwest Tanzania’. The design and opera- tion of this platform built on extensive data collection and analysis in the first phase of this project on the nature, scope and impact of artisanal and small-scale mining and local community perceptions on industrial mining.

The platform, which was designed in cooperation with the social tech enterprise Ulula, enables a two- way communication with communities working in and living around mining areas in northwest Tanza- nia. On the one hand, a selected group of informants can anonymously report incidents occurring in the mining sector via their mobile phones. Incident reports are streamlined in the platform’s case manage- ment module. On the other hand, the platform allows to send out mobile surveys on selected topics to respondents’ phones. In this way, the platform allows to complement and update contextual data on the impact of the mining sector in a hands-on and prompt manner.

This platform was piloted during a 10-month period, from October 2018 to July 2019. It served to test and try the potential of this approach, learn lessons on the nature of incidents occurring in the sector, and gain further insights on the socio-economic and human rights impact of small and large-scale mining. Given the small sample size for both the reported incidents and mobile surveys, these insights can only highlight certain tendencies and do not allow to draw general conclusions.

This report respectively presents the methodology, findings and lessons learned of the incident detection and mobile survey components of this stakeholder engagement platform for Tanzania’s mining sector.