Mining and sustainable development goals in Africa

Every country seeks to assure development that satisfies the requirements of the current generation without jeopardising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This concept was proposed in the World Commission on Environment and Development’s report, Our Common Future as Sustainable Development (SD). All United Nations members adopted the seventeen goals in 2015 to accomplish the SD. These goals are referred to as sustainable development goals (SDGs) and include 169 targets that must be met by all countries by 2030. The mining sector is critical to achieving the SDGs. While Africa is endowed with much mineral wealth potential for achieving SDGs by 2030, most of these countries are facing the problem of the “resource curse” together with other socioeconomic, environmental, and political challenges, such as civil war and extreme poverty. This review examines pertinent past and current studies to provide an overview of the relationship between the mining sector and SDGs in Africa. Relevant data and information were collected, selected, evaluated, interpreted, and presented in themes, graphs, and tables from diverse bibliographic sources, such as the Web of Sciences, Google Scholar, and grey literature. This study revealed that mining does not involve a single primary point of interaction with a single SDG. Instead, it contributes to multiple goals at the same time. This is because mining operations and businesses have numerous beneficial and negative effects on communities, ecosystems, and economies. It contributes to eliminating extreme poverty, reducing hunger, and improving human health and education in communities. It generates foreign revenue and creates jobs, allowing governments to enhance their socioeconomic infrastructure. However, the mining industry is still overwhelmingly male-dominated, and contributes to environmental problems such as climate change and other social constraints such as political instability.