How existing Africa mining substrate is surfaced against classes of cover — and where it stops.
Afrimintel's substrate already answers questions an underwriting team asks at the screening stage: where is the asset, what is the security environment around it, how stable is the host country's policy and fiscal regime, who owns it, and what stage is it at. The insurance view does not generate new answers — it re-orients the existing answers around classes of cover, and draws the boundary at the point where a decision requires actuarial apparatus the platform does not have.
The conflict-density signal is the platform's ACLED admin1 substrate: the count of recorded conflict events in the deposit's first sub-national administrative unit over a trailing twelve months. The count itself is Sourced. The platform then bins that count into an ordinal flag for triage:
The binning is an editorial triage convention, stated here in full so it can be reproduced or rejected. It is not an insurance rating and carries no implied loss frequency, severity, or premium relativity. Where an admin1 unit is not yet in the ACLED surface, the signal is marked Pending and no value is asserted.
The country composite — the same governance, Fraser policy-perception, and fiscal-terms blend used in the DFI deal evaluator — is surfaced as relative country screening context. It is referenced ordinally (more favourable / less favourable relative to the platform's country set), not as a cardinal political-risk rating. A calibrated cardinal mapping to named risk tiers is deliberately not published here: doing so without an actuarial loss basis would imply precision the substrate does not carry. That calibration is deferred to a future published increment and flagged as such rather than invented.
Each class of cover is mapped to the substrate inputs that bear on it. The mapping is editorial and additive — it tells an underwriter which existing platform signals are relevant to a given file, not what weight to give them.
| Class of cover | Substrate inputs surfaced |
|---|---|
| Property + Business Interruption | Deposit siting, province context, ACLED admin1 density, operator capex disclosures |
| Political Risk (PRI / CEND) | Country composite, sovereign/SOE ownership context, tenure-dispute context |
| Construction / Erection All Risks | Project stage, FID status, infrastructure-corridor exposure, capex profile |
| Plant, Vehicle & Transit | Corridor / logistics exposure, ACLED density along routes |
| Trade Credit | Offtake / counterparty context, sovereign stake, country fiscal band |
Two boundary points worth stating directly. First, climate. The platform does not yet hold a deployed physical-climate-exposure or transition-scenario (IEA STEPS/APS/NZE) layer for the insurance view; environmental substrate is presently a single-asset SAVi-aligned pilot. Climate-risk and PRA-CBES-type applications are therefore a named future build, triggered by a customer requirement and the data to ground it — not something the substrate supports today. Second, model-input validation. The platform’s Sourced / Derived / Absent provenance standard is, by construction, the auditable-lineage form a model-input or data-validation review requires; it is a natural fit for that work even though the platform performs no validation itself.
On each worked dossier, the Insurance Substrate Snapshot shows the Sourced conflict-density input and its ordinal flag, the relevant classes of cover, a substrate note, and — prominently — the Absent block. The snapshot is a pointer into the fuller substrate (the dossier and the deal evaluator above it), not a standalone underwriting brief.