Jagü: a platform for tracking public mining royalties

Several studies indicate a correlation between high economic dependence on the mining industry and increased public corruption in the exploited region.

This correlation has been observed in different regions, such as the Netherlands with the onset of natural gas exploration in the mid-20th century, and in countries across Africa and South America with the expansion of mining companies.

Our solution focuses on certain cities in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, including Mariana, the site of the country's largest environmental disaster following the rupture of a mining dam in 2015, and Brumadinho, located 124 km from Mariana, where another dam rupture in 2019 resulted in the loss of 270 lives.

In the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, drafted after the period of military dictatorship, the CFEM (Compensação Financeira pela Exploração de Recursos Minerais), or Financial Compensation for Mineral Resources Exploitation, was established. This involves economic returns, known as royalties, paid by companies for the commercial use of the country's mineral resources. These funds are distributed to the federal and state governments, but predominantly to the municipal government where the exploitation occurs.

According to CFEM regulations, mineral royalties should be used to improve infrastructure, environmental quality, health, and education in cities, as well as contribute to projects that promote economic diversification.

However, this is not what we observe in Brazil or in the state of Minas Gerais.

Cities with a strong mining presence, such as Ouro Preto, Itabirito, Congonhas, Catas Altas, Mariana, and Brumadinho, mentioned earlier, have extremely low indicators in education, health, mobility, and public safety. They also exhibit a strong dependency on the extractive industry, indicating a lack of economic diversity. Despite significant municipal government revenue, there is no utilization of digital transparency tools or standards to facilitate oversight of CFEM usage.

In Brazil, over 10 million inhabitants reside in areas with a strong mining presence. However, similar to other countries, few people are certain about how mineral royalties are being used by the government.

This is the problem we aim to address.

Jagü (meaning "to know" or "to understand" in the Krenak language, spoken by one of the indigenous ethnic groups in the mining-affected region of Minas Gerais) is a platform where the community can easily access monthly data on municipal CFEM revenue and, more importantly, how the compensation has been used by the local government recently.

This information is available both on our website and through email, SMS messages, and WhatsApp (widely used in the country), all communicated in simple language.

In addition to accessing CFEM information, users can suggest and vote on proposals for the utilization of this important public resource on the platform.

The technology behind Jagü is developed using a blend of PHP platforms (such as Wordpress), Python data scraping, and Artificial Intelligence, which interprets data provided by municipalities through scanned PDF documents.

Currently, through the pilot version of the Jagü, we are reaching a portion of the population in the cities of Ouro Preto and Mariana (which, together, have almost 200,000 inhabitants).

A significant portion of this population—over 30,000 people according to official data—falls below the poverty line, as per World Bank standards, and relies on public health, education, and security services, as well as economic opportunities beyond mining, to live with dignity.

The mismanagement of CFEM funds, along with a lack of understanding regarding their utilization, contributes to these cities becoming oppressive for residents and less attractive to new businesses capable of employing more people and offering better salaries.

Through the Jagü, residents can demand better decisions from city politicians, while local and national newspapers can monitor the use of CFEM by the government, and the population gains a tool capable of ending (or at least reducing) municipal corruption.

The entire team involved in producing Jagü has been living in Ouro Preto and Mariana for years.

We are deeply engaged in social causes and the economic diversification of these cities, working directly with the local government, university, local groups and businesses.

Silvia is a professor at the Ouro Preto campus of IFMG, which stands for Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Minas Gerais (Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Minas Gerais), as well as an activist in collectives within the black and women's movements in the region.

Kelson is a digital culture specialist, founder of an innovation and technology community in Mariana, and director of science, innovation, and technology at the Ouro Preto city hall.

Both are members of groups discussing local economic diversification alongside mining companies.

We currently have a basic version of the Jagü platform, providing monthly updates on CFEM data and sending out monthly notifications regarding compensation information.

For the pilot version, we utilized the Wordpress platform to manage CFEM-related content, manually inputted after scraping data from official tables (from both federal and state governments) concerning mining royalties.

Additionally, we are training our AI through machine learning to identify public deposits and payments made with CFEM funds in image files.

Approximately 30 individuals are part of our platform's testing group, including professors, students, retirees, and political activists.

We hope that through Solve, we can connect with professionals and researchers capable of helping us improve our system, making it capable of identifying and understanding various types of public documents through data scraping and artificial intelligence. This includes cross-referencing information to trace the paths of public funds in cities of varying sizes.

We also seek legal assistance and feedback to ensure that our platform contributes to establishing transparency standards for mining royalties in Brazil and other countries worldwide.