In 2007, the Government of Malawi entered a Mining Development Agreement with subsidiaries of Paladin Energy for Kayelekera Uranium Project in Karonga, Malawi. A year later, the Government signed a contract with Nyala Mines for its work at Chimwadzulu Ruby Mine, Ntcheu, including a royalty on sales of the cut and polished corundum from Columbia Gemhouse.

Since the agreement with Paladin was signed, there have been many requests for it to be made public. Malawi’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative multi-stakeholder group - made up of representatives from government, civil society and the private sector and served by a secretariat in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planing and Development - also committed to contract transparency in June 2015 in the first work plan. Calls for making all agreements public, including production sharing agreements with Rak Gas and Pacific Oil, have also been made strongly by the Natural Resources Justice Network and Publish What You Pay Malawi as recently as June 2016.

These two contracts are now available for download from Resource Contracts and the agreements can also be downloaded here GoM and Nyala Mines Ltd Agreement (2008) and GoM and Paladin Mining Development Agreement (2007).

Resource Contracts has been developed by the World Bank, the Natural Resource Governance Institute and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. The site is a repository of mining and petroleum contracts which provides searchable contracts in machine readable format with rich metadata and annotations providing key insights about each contracts. The annotations are yet to be added to the agreements signed by the Government of Malawi.