A First Look at First Quantum Minerals in Zambia

Canada has one of the world’s largest extractives markets and the new reporting under ESTMA, is a significant addition to the global standard of oil, gas, and mining transparency. There is a great deal of analysis that citizens in resource-rich countries can carry out using the new Canadian disclosures. A recent post on Extract-A-Fact discussed a few case studies and the analyses that can be conducted with the new Canadian data and more case studies should be coming online in the weeks and months ahead.

As the pool of extractive sector payment data continues to grow, it can be helpful to simply visualize the data from major companies as it comes online. Last year, Miles Litvinoff of Publish What You Pay - United Kingdom visualized Royal Dutch Shell’s first payments to governments report and highlighted key questions raised revealed by the data. Visualization of payment data renders the information in a way that can be relevant to a broad set of stakeholders and can often bring to light gaps and questions that require further analysis.

​The Kansanshi project, situated in the north western region of Zambia, is the largest copper mine in Africa. The mine is owned and operated by Kansanshi Mining Plc, which is 80% owned by the Canadian company First Quantum Minerals Ltd (FQM). The remaining 20% of Kansanshi Mining Plc is owned by ZCCM Investment Holdings Plc, an investment company owned by the government of Zambia. FQM reported its project-level payments in its first ESTMA report earlier this year. Another recent post on Extract-A-Fact guides users on accessing ESTMA disclosure reports and converting the pdf reports into a format usable for further analysis and visualization.

The visualization below shows the total payments FQM made in every country of operation.

As is clearly evident in the visualization above, FQM’s payments in Zambia are more than all of their reported payments in the rest of the world combined. The visualizations below reveal additional detail on FQM’s major projects in Zambia. First, we can visualize the company’s major projects in the country.

The payment reports provide project level payments and the visualization below demonstrates the amounts paid in each of the covered payment categories.

Visualizations of this type, would not be possible without the benefit of project-level data. Publish What You Pay coalitions globally have been advocating for the importance of project-level data for nearly a decade. Civil society organizations in resource-rich countries around the world have made clear that project-level data is critical to their ongoing accountability work.