The extractive industries sector in Africa continues to grow rapidly, offering significant opportunities but also posing complex challenges for the public sector. Effective regulation—critical to ensuring sustainable development, fair public revenue, and equitable distribution of national wealth—remains difficult to achieve. Illicit financial flows (IFFs) deepen this challenge. From tax evasion and trade mispricing to money laundering and the financing of illicit activities, these flows erode economic stability, widen inequality, and compromise development outcomes.

Natural resources belong to the citizens of each country, yet the true scale and impact of IFFs across Africa’s extractive sector remain insufficiently quantified. This gap undermines sustainable development and fuels public concerns that Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) are not always able to respond to emerging risks in real time. Strengthening SAI capacity to detect, audit, and deter IFFs is therefore essential.

To support this, AFROSAI-E hosted a Research Hackathon Workshop on Illicit Financial Flows in the Extractive Industries from 25–28 November 2025. Funded by the African Development Bank, the hackathon brought together researchers from UNISA, TUT, NWU, and the University of Pretoria’s African Tax Institute for an intensive collaborative research process under the theme:

Rethinking Audit Mechanisms to Curb Illicit Financial Flows in the Extractive Sector

Workshop Objectives

• Develop leading research publications that deepen understanding of IFFs within Africa’s extractive industries.
• Create frameworks that strengthen the capacity of SAIs and key stakeholders to identify and curb IFFs.
• Provide evidence-based recommendations to enhance AFROSAI-E’s supplementary guidance on IFFs.

The overarching goal of the workshop was to transform individual research ideas into a unified, coherent research direction, including strong chapter abstracts and a practical project implementation plan. By the end of the hackathon, participants produced a detailed project plan, chapter abstracts, and a regional Call for Papers, which will be published across AFROSAI-E’s communication platforms.

This Call for Papers aims to stimulate new research and practical insights that position SAIs as central actors in safeguarding national wealth, protecting public revenue, and advancing transparent, equitable, and climate-aligned resource governance across the continent.