Three developments across African extractives this week have something in common: each changes where risk sits in a resource value chain.

In Mozambique, ExxonMobil and its Area 4 partners have awarded approximately US$1.1 billion of contracts for long-lead upstream equipment before taking final investment decision on Rovuma LNG. The commitments follow the selection a week earlier of the contractor group undertaking early engineering and procurement work for the onshore LNG development. The consortium is beginning to spend money now to protect a future construction schedule.

In South Africa, the direction is almost reversed. Years of poor rail performance left coal production stranded behind the logistics system. As Transnet Freight Rail improves, Thungela is selling more South African coal than its mines produce and using part of the recovered rail capacity for third-party tonnes. The constraint is beginning to move from the railway back towards the mines.

Ghana's GoldBod, meanwhile, has changed how purity will be established when gold changes hands. From 1 September, XRF becomes the standard basis for determining purity across GoldBod's licensed buying network, with a minimum 0.5% purity discount where water-density testing is temporarily used instead.

The Ghanaian measure could become important infrastructure for formalising ASM gold flows. But the directive also illustrates something frequently missed when governments try to make commodity markets more bankable: standardising measurement is only half the job. The rules governing what happens when measurements disagree matter just as much.