The bar

Sourced. Derived.
Or absent. No fourth state.

Every numeric and factual claim Afrimintel publishes lives in exactly one of three categories. We replaced "100% accurate" — which is unattainable — with an operational framework: source it, derive it from sourced inputs, or admit we don't have it. Errors are inevitable. Discipline about errors is what makes a record trustworthy.

v1.0 · Adopted 25 April 2026 SLA: 7 business days material 21 pre-deploy checks block drift

The three-state model

Every numeric or factual claim Afrimintel surfaces is in one of three states:

SOURCED

Sourced. Claim derives from a named, citable, primary or institutional document with a date. The source is recorded in the platform's data layer and surfaced to the user. Examples: a deposit's reserve tonnage cited from an NI 43-101 / JORC / S-K 1300 technical report; a country's Fraser Institute IAI score; a transaction value cited from a primary press release or SEC filing.

DERIVED

Derived. Claim is the output of an Afrimintel calculation or composite whose inputs are themselves Sourced or Derived, and whose methodology is published. Output carries explicit confidence range or tier. Examples: the Afrimintel Score for a province (formula and inputs at /methodology/); the country risk composite (30/25/25/20 weighting, published).

ABSENT

Absent. Afrimintel does not hold the data and acknowledges the gap directly. Where a user asks for a fact Afrimintel does not hold, the answer is "we do not hold this" — not a guess, not a placeholder, not a training-data approximation. AI surfaces (e.g. ASK Afrimintel) carry the same discipline: the system prompt instructs the model to refuse fabrication and respond [DATABASE ABSENT] when no relevant record exists.

No fourth state. A claim that does not satisfy Sourced, Derived, or Absent does not appear on the platform. There is no category for "we'll figure this out later" or "approximately right" without a tier tag. If we have not done the work to put a claim in one of the three states, we do not publish the claim.

Field-level provenance

For records classified as INTELLIGENCE-GRADE (currently 18 deposit dossiers in the platform's database), provenance is captured at field level — not just record level. Each Reserve tonnage, Resource grade, operator name, and reporting basis carries its own tier tag and source citation. A user examining Kamoa-Kakula sees not just "Sourced from Ivanhoe NI 43-101" but the specific document, effective date, and per-field provenance.

Schema fields enforcing this discipline (v1.0.18 schema):

res_mt_reserve / grade_reserve / res_type_reserve — Proven + Probable Reserve, separated from Resource
res_mt_resource / grade_resource / res_type_resource — Measured + Indicated + Inferred Resource
reserve_basis / resource_basis — explicit "100% project basis" vs "attributable to [operator]" disclosure
operator_interest — source-qualified ownership detail
dispute_status — enum for contested assets (Manono pattern)
transparency_flag — enum for opaque or recovery-stage operators
last_reviewed — explicit date stamp; pre-deploy pipeline blocks any IG record older than 180 days

Correction-velocity SLA

Material errors corrected within seven business days. Non-material corrections (typos, formatting, version stamps) within thirty business days. Every correction is logged at /audit-log/ with: what changed, why, the source of the authoritative correction, version marker incremented, regression check, editorial sign-off.

The Audit Log is published, not internal. A correction that has not been logged is not complete.

Pre-deploy gate discipline

Every deploy is gated by an automated pre-deploy pipeline that blocks publication on any of the following findings:

Check	Severity
Permanent exclusions present in deployed surfaces	CRITICAL
Hardcoded secrets in deploy bundle	CRITICAL
Wildcard CORS in serverless functions	CRITICAL
localhost in production CORS allowlists	SIGNIFICANT
Counterparty hallucination patterns	CRITICAL
Forward-looking partnership claims without confirmed counterparty	SIGNIFICANT
Methodology reconciliation lock — every province score reconciles to formula within ±0.05	CRITICAL
Score-prose drift — supporting prose disagrees with score chip	SIGNIFICANT
Opportunity Multiplier range consistency across surfaces	SIGNIFICANT
Round-number drift between marketing copy and data	SIGNIFICANT
AI provenance contract clauses present in shared injection helper	CRITICAL
JS syntax integrity across all bundle files	CRITICAL
HTML structural balance	SIGNIFICANT
AI provenance tier tags surfaced in model responses	SIGNIFICANT
IG dossier last_reviewed within 180-day threshold	SIGNIFICANT
Reserve / Resource basis disclosure on attributable records	SIGNIFICANT
Disputed-asset surface — dispute_status flag on multi-claim records	SIGNIFICANT
Shared injection helper present and consumed by both production and audit infrastructure	CRITICAL

A CRITICAL or SIGNIFICANT finding blocks deploy. The pipeline runs at every build; the script is in the bundle at scripts/audit/pre-deploy-audit.js.

AI provenance contract

Afrimintel's AI feature (ASK Afrimintel) is governed by a published Provenance Contract embedded in the system prompt before every query. The contract instructs the model to:

Answer only from the Afrimintel database injected into the system prompt — not training-data inference
Cite the tier ([VERIFIED] / [INFERRED] / [SPECULATED] / [DATABASE ABSENT]) for every numeric or factual claim
Refuse fabrication of operator names, reserve tonnages, grades, transaction values, or counterparty relationships
Refuse to claim Afrimintel partnerships, customers, or commercial relationships unless explicitly stated in the data
Respond "Afrimintel's current dataset does not include verified information on [topic]" when no relevant record exists

Compliance with the contract is measured by a 20-query test battery (in-database / absent / adversarial / tier-mix categories). A defence-in-depth runtime audit runs after every model response, surfacing inline flags if the response contains counterparty-relationship language, forward-looking partnership claims, or permanent-exclusion terms.

What this Standard does not claim

This is not a guarantee against error. The Standard is a discipline framework, not a promise of perfection. Errors will occur. The commitment is that errors are caught quickly, corrected transparently, and logged publicly. The platform's flagship credibility is not zero-error operation; it is observable error-correction discipline.

Specific things the Standard does not promise:

That every dossier is exhaustively current — operational events outpace dossier refresh; the last_reviewed field shows the floor of staleness, the 180-day threshold the ceiling
That every Sourced citation has been independently re-verified by Afrimintel against the underlying primary document — verification depth varies by record and is reflected in the tier tag
That AI synthesis is decision-grade — AI responses carry inline audit cards but are not a substitute for human review of cited primary sources
That the Standard substitutes for accreditation — it is a published editorial framework, not a peer-reviewed industry standard backed by a governing body

Editorial responsibility

The Standard is signed and operated by a single named editorial responsibility: Nikesh Patel, Honorary Consul of Rwanda in Mauritius (nikesh@afrimintel.com). Distribution of editorial capacity across additional named reviewers is on the build roadmap, sequenced to the point a commercial event requires it. Until then, every record carries one editorial signature, and that signature is accountable.

Versioning and changes to this Standard

Changes to the Standard itself are logged at /audit-log/ under "Standard amendment." Material changes (e.g. addition or removal of a state, change to the correction SLA, change to the AI contract clauses) require explicit Audit Log entry with reasoning and effective date. Non-material editorial revisions (typos, formatting, link maintenance) are versioned but do not require a separate entry.

Adopted 25 April 2026. Last amendment: 2 May 2026 (v1.0.18 schema fields added, pre-deploy gate checks expanded). Companion documents: Methodology · Audit Log · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service.

Sourced. Derived.Or absent. No fourth state.