African Mining Governance Infrastructure and Open Deposit Register (v1.0)

A jurisdiction-level record of what African mining governance information is actually published, and on what terms, across 40 African jurisdictions — plus an open deposit register of 83 mineral deposits with screening-grade coordinates. Of 40 jurisdictions, 28 publish a public mining tenure register and 12 do not. Of those 28, 24 are portal-only: the data can be viewed but not taken. Only 4 offer any bulk or machine-readable export. Three registers are recorded as restricted and were deliberately not fetched — Kenya (anti-scraping clause), Côte d'Ivoire/SODEMI (sold commercially) and South Africa (non-commercial-use clause). Seventeen state no reuse licence at all: silence is the most common licence condition in African mining tenure. Twenty-four jurisdictions participate in at least one mineral traceability or certification scheme (ICGLR 11, Kimberley Process 18, ITSCI 4); fifteen carry a stated reason why none applies. The jurisdiction files are original observation, not a re-publication: each row records what a named register publishes and permits. Every value is in one of three states — Sourced (evidence named), Derived (a stated method over Sourced inputs), or Absent (no value carried, and why is disclosed). There is no fourth state and nothing is estimated to fill a gap. Of the 40 tenure rows, 28 are Sourced and 12 are Absent with absence_basis "not-disclosed" — a checked negative about the public record, not an unchecked gap. These files carry collection-run provenance, which is weaker than Afrimintel's per-cell contract, and the distinction is stated on every row: each carries provenance_grade "collection-run" and its collection_date (18 August 2026 for tenure, 23 August 2026 for traceability). A row marked Sourced names the register or registries it rests on; it does not assert that a person opened that page on a per-row date. Per-row read dates are an open item and will be published as v1.1 under the same concept DOI. Coordinates in the deposit file are screening-grade, derived from operator and locality distance phrases rather than surveyed. Each carries its precision and a coord_precision_basis stating whether that precision is a measurement or a default: of 83 deposits, 1 carries a per-record precision and 82 carry the generic 30 km screening-grade envelope. Fit for province and portfolio screening; not fit for drill planning or tenement boundary work. Corrections are published on an append-only public log at afrimintel.com under a stated SLA — material errors within 7 business days, non-material within 30. Afrimintel's proprietary intelligence-grade, bankability, comparable-transaction and divergence layers form no part of this release. Beneficial-ownership and mining-contract data are held out pending a share-alike licence review, because part of that layer derives from ResourceContracts.org under CC BY-SA 4.0. Editorial responsibility: Nikesh Patel, Afrimintel Ltd (Mauritius, company no. 236730). Interest disclosure: Afrimintel's Editor-in-Chief holds two Great Lakes positions — Honorary Consul of Rwanda in Mauritius, and Chairman of MUA Insurance Rwanda. Neither involves mining or mineral assets, and no editorial opinion on those jurisdictions is offered here.