The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2019

52 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Aerial view of the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) community at Nyamurhale, South Kivu, DRC. Roughly 500,000 persons directly depend on ASM for survival income in eastern DRC, and it is estimated that this income indirectly benefits as many as three million family members. Inset: Conflict-free artisanal gold from eastern DRC. More than 95 percent of artisanal gold—estimated at 40 metric tons per year, with a value of $1.8 billion—is mined illegally and smuggled out of the country. and vet these new ideas alongside others representing civil society, donors and governments. One industrial miner even reported that he learned more about artisanal and small-scale mining in three days than he had learned in a 25-year career working in the DRC. The new projects that will be awarded should be rolled out this winter, helping catalyze investment and financing from the private sector to increase exports of “clean” conflict-free gold and improve the livelihoods of miners. These collaborations will drive innovation at the intersection of business and development to reduce donor subsidization of responsible minerals trade and, hopefully, one day end the need for its existence. Kevin Fox currently serves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as the director of the Economic Growth Office. He joined the Foreign Service in 2009 and previ- ously served one tour in Jamaica and two tours with USAID/West Bank and Gaza. He has a passion for developing market- driven solutions to development and has helped leverage more than $100 million in private capital for USAID programs in the field during his career. Prior to USAID, he was an operations manager for a Fortune 500 company, managed construction projects in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay. Convincing Nigerians to Buy American Nigeria, 1981 By George Griffin I went to Lagos as commercial counselor in November 1981. At the time Nigeria was the source of our fourth-largest trade deficit because of our oil imports, and the United States was Nigeria’s second-largest export market. My job was to convince the Nigerians, since we were buying a lot of their oil, that they needed to reciprocate by buying more American goods. Com- petition was fierce, and the commercial section’s workload was huge. Ambassador Tom Pickering viewed the commercial function of the embassy as one of the more important aspects of his job. He wanted a political officer as head of the commercial section, saying you can’t dissociate the two. I worked closely with the political and economic sections, and we formed a bilateral busi- ness council made up of business leaders from both countries who agreed to try to influence their governments to facilitate business. A year after the council was formed, Vice President George H.W. Bush came to Lagos to bless it. Nigerians were not catalog or internet buyers. They wanted to touch, feel, drive or play with whatever was being sold. With this in mind, we organized big trade shows, sharing the cost with several other posts. Our primary focus was to help small American businesses who otherwise couldn’t afford to market their goods and services abroad. Under the terms of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act we worked with only the most trustworthy Nigerian businesspeo- ple. I tried to convince the American business community that it was not a fatal blow to have to comply with the FCPA, while making clear what would happen to them if they got caught An artisanal miner removes clay deposits using a manual hand-scrubbing method. Processing artisanal gold is very labor-intensive, and sometimes mechanization is not sustainable on small-scale sites. STORYUP STORYUP STORYUP