Mali's Council of Ministers, chaired by transitional president Assimi Goïta, met in ordinary session on September 30, 2026 at the Palais de Koulouba and adopted decrees creating a new École des Mines et du Pétrole and transforming the existing Programme pour le développement des ressources minérales into a full public scientific and technological institution, the Agence pour la recherche et le développement des ressources minérales. The decisions were reported on the Mines Minister's own briefing to the Council, Professor Amadou Keïta, and were covered consistently by Alwihda Info, malijet.com, maliweb, Bamada.net and the official government communiqué (CM N°2026-39/SGG), each describing the move as part of Mali's push to train domestic technical cadres and strengthen state capacity in the mining and petroleum sectors.
According to the government's own account, the decision to upgrade the mineral resources programme followed an internal assessment that found the existing structure inadequate: officials pointed to problems with its legal status, the evolving institutional and legal framework of the mining sector, procedures for mobilising financial resources, and the absence of any mandate covering petroleum and gas research. The new agency is intended to address those gaps by giving the former programme a more formal institutional footing, though the specific budget and staffing details beyond its statutory creation were not included in the publicly available communiqué.
The creation of a dedicated school is framed by the government as an effort to build homegrown engineering and technical expertise for Mali's mining and nascent petroleum sectors, responding to what officials describe as a shortage of specialised training institutions for mining and petroleum professions and insufficient attention to the sector's various sub-specialties in existing training programmes.
The same Council of Ministers session also approved a round of gold and group-2 mineral exploration permit renewals, naming the companies involved: Company Mines and Career (Comicar), Hongda Liujiu Mali, Ressources Robex Mali, Dansoko Gold Mine, M.B.C. Diffusion, Wagadou Explore, Yong Xin Mines (which received two separate permits, at Kinia and Kandjila-Ouest in the Cercle de Bougouni) and Africa Mining. Most of these were first-time renewals of permits granted between 2018 and 2022; Africa Mining's permit, covering the Dandoko site in the Cercle de Kéniéba, received a second renewal rather than a first. The renewals continue a broader unwinding of Mali's suspension of exploration-permit renewals, which ran from December 2022 to March 2025 as part of a sectoral review tied to the transitional government's push to increase state revenue and ownership stakes in mining, including its earlier actions against some foreign gold operators.
The available reporting does not give a timeline for when the École des Mines et du Pétrole will open, where it will be located, or how it will be funded, though the mines ministry has previously flagged the school's "opérationnalisation" as a near-term priority. Similarly, no detail has emerged on the concrete new powers of the mineral resources agency beyond the rationale officials gave for the change. These remain open questions pending further government disclosure.
The decisions sit within Mali's broader resource-sovereignty agenda, which has already included a new state gold refinery, increased state stakes in mining ventures, and a mass cancellation of non-compliant exploration permits. As an administrative and regulatory announcement, the creation of the school and agency signals institutional intent rather than an immediate operational milestone; their practical impact on Mali's mining sector will depend on implementation details not yet public. What to watch: confirmation of the school's funding and opening date, the agency's statutory powers, and further disclosure on the twelve permit-renewal decrees adopted in the same session.