This new extended data set includes information on the lending entity, the borrowing country, the amount of the loan, the year of loan agreement signing, the type of resources involved, the nature of collateralization, when available, projects to be financed by the loan and repayment terms. The information collected on each loan is compiled from a variety of sources, including African government sources, lending entities, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) reports, AidData’s Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset (Dreher et al. 2021), investment reports from multilaterals, as well as fieldwork and interviews with experts. Primary source information is then complemented with a review of the financial press.

The data has been checked against the World Bank’s Debtor Reporting System (DRS). The DRS collects detailed loan-byloan information on new public and publicly guaranteed external debt. The DRS does not include information on any collateral features of loans, however. We therefore also contacted relevant WB country economists or national debt offices to verify the information where possible.

While significant effort has been spent on ensuring the accuracy of the data, the reliance on mixed sources and methods may justify a level of caution and verification in the use of facts and figures from this research in further analysis, including referring directly to the underlying data sets and sources for specific details. RBL contracts are rarely publicly available. Nevertheless, whenever publicly available, we analyzed contract text. These were identified through NRGI’s oil, gas and mining contracts5 and Gelpern (2021).

Our research identified 30 RBLs made in the 2004 to 2018 period in Sub-Saharan Africa that match the focal area of our review and where sufficient minimum information was available to incorporate into our data set. These minimum criteria consisted of having details on both the lending and borrowing entity, the size of the loan, the year the loan was agreed and confirmation that the loan had a repayment period beyond a single year.

Our data set is by no means comprehensive, and there are certainly more RBLs which match our criteria but for which insufficient information was readily accessible. The data set, and therefore the analysis, is limited by the information that is publicly available. As described further in Section 5b, the RBL landscape remains largely opaque, with limited information publicly available about the terms, and at times even the existence, of RBLs.

# 4. Results: Key characteristics of RBLs

## a. Overview of the RBLs analyzed

Our research identified 30 RBLs in Africa signed between 2004 and 2018. Included in our review were 11 African countries which borrowed RBLs during the period: Angola, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana, Guinea, Niger, the Republic of Congo, São Tomé and Príncipe, South Sudan, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. The relevant RBLs totaled USD$ 46.5 billion agreed in this period, of which Angola accounted for nearly half the total.6, 7

> 5 <u>http://ResourceContracts.org</u>

> 6 For the purpose of this paper, commitment is defined as amounts committed under signed loan agreements. In the cases of large credit lines that support multiple projects, disbursed amounts are used when available.

> 7 All dollar signs ($) refer to United States dollars (USD) in this paper unless otherwise specified.

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