We, participants of the Tanzania Alternative Mining Conferencedrawn from Faith Based Organisations (FBOs), Civil Society Organizations (CSO), Academia, representatives from the mining communities, Mining Companies, and regional representatives from South Africahaving gathered at Blue Pearl Hotel  in Dar Es Salaam from 13th -14th November 2013 extensively deliberated under the theme   “ Effective  Management of our Natural resources ,Our promising  Future ”;

The government of Tanzania has been advised to put in place robust mechanisms that will ensure benefits of gas extraction are maximized for local people.

Speaking at a recent Policy Forum breakfast debate, Mr. Silas Olang, the Senior Regional Associate (Africa) Revenue Watch Institute (RWI), said this would require observing three major things: high Government commitment, supportive international oil companies and a high focus on developing human resources.

In pursuit of realising significant developments and addressing the challenges in the natural gas industry, the government embarked on developing the policy and legal framework to govern exploration and production, transportation and distribution of natural gas. In November 2012, the Ministry of energy and minerals released a draft natural gas policy for public consultation.

To this end, Policy Forum held a Breakfast Debate on Thursday 24th January, 2013 to discuss the draft gas policy and present were CSO and industry representatives to air their views.

Following the significant discovery of natural gas in Tanzania, the government embarked on developing the policy and legal framework to govern exploration and production, transportation and distribution of natural gas among others. To that end, in November 2012, the Ministry of energy and minerals released a draft natural gas policy for public consultation. We, the undersigned CSO networks met on the 5th November 2012 to discuss and analyze the draft policy with the aim of providing inputs for improvement of the draft policy with national interests at the fore.

In February 2009, Tanzania acceded to the EITI following accomplishment of initial requirements of EITI. In a public declaration in mid November 2008, the Government stated Tanzania's commitment to implement the EITI.

Geological survey show that Tanzania is endowed with many kinds of extractive resources and mining accounts for about 3.2% of Tanzania's GDP and 3.6% of its total tax revenues. Gold represents about 90% of these mineral exports and the petroleum sector is dominated by natural gas. Uranium is being explored in different parts of the country and it is estimated that Tanzania possesses 53.9 million pounds of uranium oxide (U3O8) deposits, valued at $2.2 billion.

This was said at the Policy Forum breakfast talk which took place on the 28th September 2012.

The government of Tanzania has committed to continue increasing its efforts towards supporting small and medium sized mining enterprises to foster the increase of local content in the mining sector.

This was revealed yesterday when the Acting Commissioner for Minerals (Tanzania), Mr. Ally Bondo Samaje was delivering his speech at the national conference on minerals, oil and gas organised by Policy Forum in collaboration with Haki Madini and the Interfaith Standing Committee for Economic Justice and Integrity of Creation.

WE, the undersigned Tanzanian Civil Society Organizations virtually convened on 13th March, 2012 to discuss the proposed EU regulations on mandatory disclosure on extractives and logging and its implications to the governance of Tanzanian oil, gas, mineral and forest sectors.

RE-AFFIRMour commitment to promote transparent, effective and efficient management of extractive resources in practice beyond just empty words; this takes strong, robust and credible monitoring mechanisms

Multi-stakeholder Group (MSG) of the TEITI launched the second EITI report which shows among other things that Tanzania received more than USD 300 million from the mining sector in 2009/2010 up almost three times of the reported revenues for the previous year.

The report also represents a step forward from the first report published one year ago including gas revenues being covered for the first time.

Also 24 oil, gas and mining companies have now disclosed their payments more than double as many as in the previous report.