Jeff Geipel – Measuring and managing mining local procurement

Founder and Managing Director of Mining Shared Value

jeffgeipel@ewb.ca

Local procurement is a key pillar for both creating host country benefits and securing a social licence to operate in the mining sector, and one that has often been overlooked as an ESG issue. Procurement of goods and services in most cases is actually the single largest in-country payment type by a mine site, often more than payments to governments, wages and community investment combined.

Companies who cannot demonstrate they are taking proactive efforts to purchase more from local suppliers, represent a significant risk for investors. What is more, companies in all sectors are now being criticized and facing lawsuits for problematic practices upstream in suppliers, and there have been many high-profile corruption allegations involving extractive industries where procurement was the alleged means for the activity.

As such, mining companies can create business value by increasing the amount of information available on their local procurement efforts – both by demonstrating the value they are creating for host economies, and by showing evidence they have systems in place to prevent allegations of wrong-doing involving suppliers. This is where the Mining Local Procurement Reporting Mechanism (LPRM) comes into play. The LPRM is a publicly available set of disclosures on procurement processes and spend, a tool which can be used to assist companies and governments alike to design systems to increase the amount of goods and services sourced locally, and make procurement more transparent. In this presentation, Jeff Geipel will explore the importance of local procurement in strong ESG approaches, and introduce the potential held in LPRM.

Biography

Jeff Geipel is the founder and managing director for the Mining Shared Value initiative at Engineers Without Borders Canada. This initiative works to improve the development impacts of mineral extraction in host countries through increasing local procurement by the global mining industry. Through this work Jeff is also the Community Manager for the World Bank’s Extractives-led Local Economic Diversification Community of Practice.

Before Engineers Without Borders Jeff was the founder and first executive director of Fair Trade Vancouver, which became a model for municipal-based fair trade organizations across Canada. Originally from Vancouver, Jeff holds a master’s degree in international development from the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. Jeff currently resides in London