Project Case Study
Mongolia Extractives Sector Subnational communications
Increasing stakeholder collaboration and dialogue in the most remote regions
Dialogue and public awareness at both national and sub-national level are critically important for a sector that in 2017 accounted for 72.6% of Mongolia’s total export earnings and 21.6% of GDP. One of the key objectives of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) is to foster an informed, independent and constructive public debate about the mining sector and its role in Mongolia.
Globally, the EITI process has a twofold objective: one, to improve private sector and government revenue generation and allocation reporting, and two: to improve dialogue amongst government, private sector and civil society using a multi-stakeholder open forum. Often, however, subnational communications and public awareness are deprioritised as EITI reports tend to be data heavy, and sometimes hard to understand for people with no financial background.
The main objective of the pilot programme was to test a number of ideas and experiment with various concepts and communications approaches on a relatively small-scale – i.e. in five pilot soums (‘districts’) – in order to learn from their application. Following a process of selecting the pilot soums where the programme would take place – some producing regions, and others with nascent operations – we supported the National EITIM Secretariat in the development of its first Subnational Communications Strategy. The strategy had a twofold approach to implementation: media and outreach communications and establishing information sharing mechanisms. This approach was adopted for the pilot’s scale-up plan.
In order to raise awareness of the EITI at the subnational level, the subnational communications pilot programme supported greater transparency in Mongolia’s mining sector by raising EITI awareness by 36% across the five pilot soums. Using a diverse range of communications channels and established structures such as Herders Day and the Livestock Consensus, the programme successfully improved stakeholder collaboration and dialogue in the selected pilot regions.
Project success
- Five EITI Information Centres established in the 5 pilot soums; 792 visitors monitored over the span of 3 months (Oct – Dec 2017)
- Three EITI Subnational Councils established and operating, including some with monthly meetings where important community issues are raised.
- Information Coordinators hired, training sessions conducted, information materials widely distributed including through major local events, active television, and social media. 4 of the 5 programme-hired local Coordinators were offered yearly contracts with the EITI National Secretariat upon pilot’s completion.
