EITI is a Sleeping Giant. It's Time to Wake It Up.

Remarks delivered during the plenary session “Building trust in uncertain times,” 8 October 2026. The text follows below.

Three words. Buried in the fine print of the frameworks reshaping the global resource economy. Three words whose implementation could decide whether this new wave of resource deals delivers on our shared ambition: that wealth below the ground benefits the people who live above it.

You've heard it this morning: oil, gas and mining are at the top of political and economic agendas. Energy dominance. Economic growth. National security. [And we’ve heard ambition from leadership like Minister Diof]. This should be an unprecedented opportunity for the low- and middle-income countries that hold much of these resources.

Instead, deals are struck at breakneck speed, under enormous pressure, and often on imbalanced terms. What's on the table is no longer just royalties and tax rates. It is security guarantees. It is health funding. Governments are being asked to trade long-term access to their resources to meet today's urgent needs.

Speed and pressure crowd out accountability. Over 200 mining projects were announced this year alone, most of them shrouded in opacity. Human rights abuses linked to transition minerals surged 73% in the past year. And the foundations we relied on before — rule of law and international cooperation — are crumbling.

So where is the bulwark? NRGI reviewed recent frameworks and roadmaps that guide new resource deals and agreements. And time and again, we found those three surprising, and powerful words: the EITI Standard. 

Three words that carry twenty years of hard-won gains. Contract transparency. Beneficial ownership. Anti-corruption. Revenue management. Environmental and social transparency. State-owned enterprises. Civil society participation.

EITI is a sleeping giant. It is already written into the architecture of the new resource economy. Even as some leaders dismiss transparency and accountability, references to the EITI Standard abound. 

Take the G7. They've struggled to agree on much lately. Yet their critical minerals roadmap names the EITI values and principles as criteria for standards-based markets, including the rule of law and guarding against bribery and corruption.

Or the World Bank Group. The IFC Performance Standards influence how many of these deals are financed. They reference EITI requirements on contract and revenue transparency, and they are under review right now.

The EU's approach to minerals partnerships. The African Union's Green Minerals Strategy. A draft Chinese industry mining code. Each cites the EITI Standard, opening a door to hold the most powerful players in the sector accountable.

But a framework is not a deal. The deals are where the rubber hits the road and most are done behind closed doors. Only when resource deals and partnerships are made public can we bring the power of these EITI references to bear. To shape their terms and ensure EITI best practices are implemented.

Waking the giant falls to each of us in this room.

For civil society: Every reference to EITI is a promise we can hold up: show us the contract. Show us who owns the company. Show us where the money went.

But that only happens if civil society can speak out, can gather peacefully and can organize without fear. CIVICUS rates 43 EITI implementing countries as having closed, repressed or obstructed civic space. Forty-three. The recent statement on civic space by the EITI Board is welcome, but insufficient. Civic space must be a meaningful and mandatory test in the upcoming validations, not merely a principle we reaffirm.

For supporting countries: you helped make this Standard a global norm. Now uphold it in your policies, the transparency and terms of your deal-making, and your aid budgets. Where competition is tough on price or technology, higher standards are how you stand apart and build resilient supply chains.

For producer countries: these references are bargaining power. When a partner cites the EITI Standard, hold them to it. Make partnerships transparent. Make accountability part of the price of access.

For companies: good governance means stable projects. Opaque deals made under pressure are the ones that tend to unravel, in courts, in parliaments, on the streets. Rather than competing efforts, let’s use what we have, and keep evolving it. Demand that EITI norms are not just cited but implemented in the way you operate.

And for us in EITI as a whole: we must take up the space we have earned. Decisions taken today will impact generations to come, and the work of EITI must keep pace. The recent guidance on government-to-government deals, value addition strategies, and the new global database all head the right direction. But we must act on them today, not years from now in the next Standard.

More than twenty years ago, NRGI was among the civil society organizations who called for the EITI Standard, alongside reformers from government and industry. We've been supporters and critical friends ever since. Together, we made transparency an expectation rather than an exception. Together, we won a seat for independent civil society alongside governments and companies — a superpower, if we defend it and wield it.

“The EITI Standard” is a giant we built together. Twenty years of hard-won gains, waiting to be unleashed. Let's wake it up. Thank you.