Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. I want to thank you for inviting me. Let me be a bit precise about what my background is. I'm a lecturer in the anthropology department of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and over the last 20 years my research has mainly focused on west Africa and on

Foreign Affairs committee  Okay. I'm sorry.

Foreign Affairs committee  Fine, all right. I'm not going to repeat. I'm going to carry on. Do you think I should I recapitulate briefly?

Foreign Affairs committee  The mining sectors of countries like Mali and Burkina Faso have undergone substantial changes over the last 20 years. Burkina Faso has made a shift from dominant state intervention to a sector giving ample room to private companies. In this process of liberalization, tasks of t