The Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, represented by the Minister of Mines, Hon. Nargis Nehan, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with RDF.
The document states the Ministry’s intention to move forward with RDF systems, using them for mining license management, processing of mining rights applications in the future, compliance monitoring and payment registration. In return, RDF will continue to support the Ministry with or without project funding in order to secure the achievements in data management and transparency.
RDF systems MCAS and NTRS have been installed at the Ministry during 2017 in a project with DFID funding. Since then, the systems have been filled with all available Mining License Data, and RDF staff has been present at the Ministry at all times to assist with digitization. Building on these efforts, the Ministry has now released the Online Transparency Portal (https://afghanistan.revenuedev.org/) openly publishing mining data directly from MCAS. A link to the portal is available at the Ministry website (http://mom.gov.af/).
With the MoU signed and the Online Transparency Portal officially in use, the Ministry looks forward to fully integrate MCAS and NTRS into its daily workflow. Several system users and a system administrator from the Ministry’s Cadastre Directorate are in the process of being trained and have already made quick progress. While continuing the training, we aim to include other units of the ministry to see MCAS and NTRS evolve to be a Ministry-wide comprising system integrating data on payments, license holders’ compliance and mining production. RDF engineers will also provide plugins to have the MCAS connect to other Ministry’s data sources, such as the Ministry of Commerce’s database on registered business entities. Project activities are scheduled to continue with GIZ support at least until March 2019.
