financial flows out of Africa estimates that such movements of funds amount to some $50 billion annually.332 is imperfectly understood. This makes public involvement in resolving it difficult. It is also notable that it is not only companies that are held responsible for this, but also national governments and politicians who are viewed as facilitating or even encouraging illicit financial flows. Survey results Several responses claimed that foreign investors were given preferences over local firms. A respondent from Malawi commented, ‗They favour foreign investors more by offering them tax breaks.‘ A respondent from Lesotho made similar observations. At the very least, this demonstrates that the question of undue advantage being accorded to foreign businesses is widely recognised, albeit not always in great detail. What – or what more – can the APRM do about lack of domestic resource mobilisation The APRM‘s utility as a research tool could be put to excellent use in this respect. 1. The body of knowledge on the state of resource contracts and resource governance is incomplete, and the APRM could play a valuable role in collating country level information. This would include the provisions of contracts, how they are operating in reality, and evaluating whether they are developmentally appropriate in the context of particular countries. This information would be included in the CRRs, and might also be made available to the general public in a spirit of transparency. 2. The APRM would also perform a great service by giving citizens an opportunity to engage with the issue. The survey conducted for this study showed significant information gap on this issue. The APRM could do this through the entire chain of APRM-related activities, from the CSAR to the deployment of the country review missions to the resulting country review reports that must be disseminated back in the countries. In respect of the latter, a good national-level media strategy would be an asset. 3. Given that managing resources is a challenge shared across much of the continent, this is an area where information sharing could be of inestimable benefit. Understanding best practices and mutual alignment of investment codes and incentives (in the context of regional integration) should receive attention. This could receive high-level guidance and endorsement by the APR Forum, while ongoing cooperations could be managed by the Committee of Focal Points and information dissemination by the proposed Knowledge Hub. The survey also asked respondents a set of questions about resource contracts. These included whether they were publicly available, whether they had stabilisation clauses and whether resource companies had used or threatened to take their host governments for arbitration to enforce the terms of stabilisation clauses. Interestingly, for the most part, the respondents – a wellinformed group, active in the governance field – were unable to offer clear answers. On the issue of public availability of contracts, a few (such as a respondent from Sierra Leone) said confidently that contracts were available. More claimed that contracts were not publicly available. For example, a respondent from Togo said: ‗Those contracts are not publicly available. There are no policy reasons behind their non-availability. The Secretariat of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative's Office in Togo recently (in March 2016) requested the Government to make those agreements available for people but there has been no official response from the government for the time being.‘ A respondent from Tanzania remarked: ‗Contracts are top government secret. Even the parliamentarians do not know the content of the contracts.‘ And a respondent from Uganda noted: ‗None of the contracts are public allegedly for security reasons.‘ (Leaked versions of contracts have, however, found their way into the public domain.) Responses to questions about the involvement of resource firms in illicit financial flows produced a more definite set of answers, albeit with a large number of respondents claiming to lack knowledge of the issue. While few were able to provide any substantive details, the belief or assumption that firms were illicitly depriving the host society of resources was widespread. Several linked this to the complicity of national political elites. The respondents‘ answers add an interesting dimension to this bottleneck. While the broad issue is recognised, it 332 Bottleneck 13: Structural inequalities in access to opportunities all (Geneva: Africa Progress Panel, 2013) p. 65. High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, Illicit Financial Flow, Report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa (UNECA 2015) p. 13. 61