Artisanal/small-scale mining, legal or not, has for many years been overlooked by many African countries. Some policy makers have advocated banning the sector once and for all because it was associated with many problems ranging from environmental, significant health, safety, child labor, significant volume of land degradation/deforestation. Several African countries have found that banning the sector was impossible in practice as the lack the necessary tools to do so, one of them being socio-economic.
Artisanal/small-scale mining is informal, very low tech, labor intensive and therefore accessible rural communities.
It’s not rare to see many farmers with their families (wives and children) and also rural youth who lost hope of being part of the new Africa embark in artisanal mining activities with all the negative consequences we all witness today because of growing poverty in rural area.
Those policy makers who advocated in the early days to ban this sector have not only realized today that it is a loss battle, but they also acknowledged that there are incentives for African states to organize and regulate artisanal/small scale mining activities so as to rip the benefit from it.
In 2008 the founder of INAREC Dr. Yassiah Bissiri was tasked with proposing recommendations on how to deal with the phenomenon of artisanal (Legal and illegal) mining by the government of Burkina Faso. The problem was getting out of control and concrete solutions were needed. Two Teams of six people were formed and dispatched to collect critical information and data on the actors. For eight months, Dr Yassiah Bissiri
and his teams met with actors and networks on the field. Valuable data of how to help change the paradigm of artisanal mining, which resulted on a master degree from one of the team member, were collected. At INAREC, we know artisanal mining and the miners. This why we believe that we can take our past studies into a new level: Transforming artisanal/small scale mining into and effective economic growth pole
- An economic pole mimics a mining town
- Several towns in the world exists today because of past and current mining activities
- Several cities and towns have a natural resource history
- The difference however between mining town and economic pole resides in the fact that economic poles dynamically move
- Managing a high mineralized zone as a little town. Build in several economic benchmarks that people on site will depend on
- Introducing the concept of a “Artisanal miners economic house” (Concept to be developed). It is the key to the dynamic economic zone concept
