Delegates from the participating countries. Photo credit to GIZ IMRI program.

On 10 and 11 November 2015, G7‘Fast-Track Partnerships´ Conference’ on mid-term review of the EITI was organized by GIZ Integrated Mineral Resource Initiative (IMRI) at Shangri-La Hotel, Ulaanbaatar.

Delegates from four participating countries - Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, shared their experiences with Mongolian colleagues during these two days with attention to the following focal areas:

(1) capacity building on the EITI;
(2) multi-stakeholder group cooperation; and
(3) interest in alternative initiatives to the EITI.

IRIM has provided consulting services to IMRI program in terms of workshop methodology to create the Minutes of Understanding (MOU); organising the parallel workstream sessions and assisted in the creation of the final MOU.

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Parallel work stream session.

Furthermore, IRIM presented its design and theory of change in ‘measuring the impact of the EITI in Mongolia’. The presentation attracted a lot of interest from the delegates of Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

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Dolgion Aldar (IRIM CEO), presenting sections from ‘Design of Impact Evaluations of EITI in Mongolia’ project, funded by 3ie

The ‘Fast-Track Partnerships´ was set-up in 2013 to support extractive industries governance and promote the EITI standard globally. In this respect, Mongolia and Germany formed partnership. GIZ Integrated Mineral Resource Initiative (IMRI) program was commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), as implementing agency of this partnership.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) aims to increase transparency in financial transactions between governments and companies within the extractive industries. At the national level, the EITI is a government-led initiative, however, the EITI process calls for the active involvement of extractive industry companies and other partners from wider society. Mongolia achieved Compliant status by the transparency standard EITI in 2010.