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“Development is coming, but the development is going to certain areas and certain people,” Mr. Chachoka said, taking a break from trying to coax enough food from his scraggly field to feed his six children.

Yet, after a substantial drop in the first postwar decade, gains against poverty have slowed substantially, analysts say, leaving millions stuck below the poverty line and raising tough questions about whether Africa’s resource boom can effectively raise the standard of living of its people.

the new gas and coal deals are wrapped up in multibillion-dollar megaprojects that rarely create large numbers of jobs or foster local entrepreneurship, according to an analysis by the United States Agency for International Development.

"This is a new colonial era. This time it's not government; it's corporations," Lemos says.

"I think everything is new to them, but according to our social department, the people are very happy because they have all the infrastructure," Adachi says.

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), charged with overseeing U.S. stock exchanges, approved rules on the implementation of two widely anticipated provisions of a broad financial reform package passed by the U.S. Congress in mid-2010, known in part as Dodd-Frank.

The first provision, section 1502, is aimed at cutting off financial support for so-called conflict minerals, whose extraction and sale has been blamed in part for financing rebel groups in several countries, particularly those at the centre of the violence raging in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Indeed, the legislative text of section 1502 specifically notes the situation in the DRC.

While proponents of the provisions suggest that the SEC has no mandate to actually reject laws enacted by Congress, there has been much anticipation during the course of the SEC deliberations. There has also been mounting frustration from across the ideological spectrum as the SEC has failed to act, in part citing massive public response on the issue.

Fifty years later, many of the issues problematised by post-independent generations remain with us today and we are resolute that they must and should be addressed. It is amongst the huge ironies of the sector, that according to the Mckinsey Report entitled “Reverse The Curse: Maximising the Potential of Resource Driven Economies of December 2013”, that “69 per cent of people in extreme poverty are in resource-driven countries and that almost 80 per cent of the countries, whose economies have historically been driven by resources have per capita income levels below the global average.” This is a situation that must be untenable to us all, to governments and international organisations as much as it should be to mining executives, financiers, investors and professionals.

Central to the African Mining Vision is, therefore, the development of the sector on the continent, out of the enclaves, into a sector that can “catalyse and contribute to the broad-based growth and development of, and is fully integrated into, a single African market.” We have to get serious and work sector by sector, and region by region on the building of down-stream linkages into mineral beneficiation and manufacturing and up-stream linkages into mining capital goods, consumables and services industries.

Africa is also a large producer of the mineral Columbite-tantalite (or coltan, the colloquial African term) and as the second fastest growing cell phone market in the world, also needs to look at this sector, as a producer rather than as consumer only. We often talk about African growth being driven by demand for its commodities in Asia and other parts of the world, but as our economies reach the critical tipping point of sustained 7 per cent and above growth, with greater diversification and industrialisation, and with our population set to reach two billion by 2050, we must also pay attention to stimulating and meeting domestic African demand.

Kemal Özkan, assistant general secretary of IndustriAll, said the deaths of 33 gold miners when a tunnel collapsed at a Rio joint venture mine in Indonesia last May could have been avoided.

But said Rio's board believed both safety and environmental issues would not be improved by the company pulling out of the operation in Papua.

He claimed that the Indonesian human rights commission found that the operators of the Grasberg mine, owned with US company Freeport, "had the ability to prevent this from happening but didn't"."The lack of effort jeopardised the lives of others. The gravity of this case is serious," he quoted Indonesian human rights commissioner Natalius Pigai as saying in a report into the incident.

Starting roughly a year ago, in Sudan and Algeria and then spreading to Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, a series of mostly non-violent protests rocked the foundations of autocratic rule. A long-standing dictator was toppled in Khartoum and several heads of government were forced to step down in Algiers, Beirut and Baghdad. Even in Iran, Hassan Rouhani was facing pressure to resign.

It was forced to acknowledge the death of innocent lives and offer bereaving families financial compensation. To date, the Iranian government has refused to release an official death toll.

This development was a huge political and ideological gift to Iranian hardliners and their regional allies who were the target of many of these regional protests, especially in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.