Guinea—Assessing Sector Capacity for Foreign Direct Investment Linkages

The opening of new bauxite, gold, and iron ore mines in Guinea brought with it the potential to accelerate the country’s economic development and positively impact local livelihoods. New investments in the burgeoning mining industry could create jobs, raise incomes, and promote the development of local small and medium enterprises, but only if critical market constraints could be identified and addressed by the country’s policymakers. To help ensure that new mining projects in Guinea maximized benefits to the domestic economy, the Ministry of Mines, with support from the World Bank, contracted DAI’s Sustainable Business Group (SBG) to develop its Domestic Value Addition policy (DVA). As a key guiding document, the DVA policy would assess current local value chains and provide a pathway to improve the competitiveness and capacity of Guinean small and medium enterprises.

Using DAI’s Local Content Optimization Model, the SBG team assessed 10 commercial sectors in Guinea, including construction services, equipment manufacturing, logistics, machine maintenance and repair, and food catering. The analysis helped to determine which industries had the highest potential to provide local content to new mining investors and identify job skills needed for local workers to find employment in these value chains. The report provided policy suggestions and a strategic action plan to address market constraints and skills gaps, with specific recommendations for women-owned business, as well as offered an effective evaluation framework to measure inclusive domestic growth.