A Better World Volume 1

Profile: Amina

Amina is a small-scale miner who owns several

alluvial gold concessions in the eastern and central

regions of Ghana.

Amina’s 30 permanent staff are all men, for whom

she pays salaries, Social Security and National

Insurance Trust, and medical bills. About 60 per cent

of her 100-plus temporary workers or contractors are

women, who are paid based on the amount of gold

they make.

“I started as a gold buyer because I saw it as very

lucrative,” Amina says. “A concession owner cheated

me and I seized his land and mined it to get my money

back. Following that, I applied for and obtained a

concession from the Minerals Commission and started

my own small-scale mine. I applied for a licence, which

took a long time, but it finally came. I also did an

environmental impact assessment of the site.”

Amina has not engaged the services of surveyors

because she believes that she intuitively knows where

the gold is located. According to an exploration team

from the village, 40 per cent of Amina’s 50-acre

concession at Kwabeng is minable, and the mine has

a projected life of two years.

“I do not know the total resource,” Amina says. “I

mine it step by step depending on which farmer gives

me the access.”

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their ventures. Regionally, the overarching Agenda 2063

recognizes lack of access to productive resource as a key

limitation to women’s engagement in the economic sector,

and has set an ambitious target of levelling the playing field

of gender equality by 2020 (and providing about 90 per

cent access to productive resource for women in its 10-year

implementation plan.

In terms of the poverty-wealth nexus, the data gath-

ered for the research suggested that most women get into

ASM because of poverty, with only a small proportion of

respondents entering because of the subsector’s wealth

creation potential. Scholars have alluded to the stronghold

of poverty as the major driver in ASM.

In this regard,

when women enter ASM with limited understanding of the

sector and the mentality of getting rich quickly (especially

in the gold and gemstone industry), the drive changes to

wealth creation without them having adequately prepared

themselves. The fine line between preparation and lack of

preparation by those who enter for wealth creation makes a

difference in how women are able to engage in the subsec-

tor. Women in Ghana, Zimbabwe, South Africa and others

told how they learned within a short time to adequately

prepare and understand how the subsector works and, with

some (although little) government intervention, have been

able to reap compounded benefits from mining. The fine

nexus between poverty and wealth, and lack of preparation

in terms of understanding the fundamental requirements,

limit women’s effective participation in mining. Broadly,

however, the nexus is tied to the added advantage of educa-

tion, socioeconomic status, and support structures to boost

women’s capacity for mining.

Women’s often limited level of education, awareness

and access to knowledge constrains their roles in the

ASM subsector and their potential economic empower-

ment. Many women are not aware of the laws governing

mining activities, including the processes related to mining

licences, environmental management requirements, health

and safety regulations and practices, mining value and

supply chains, and business development and implemen-

tation strategies. Across Africa, women’s low levels of

literacy and education affect their ability to gain the tech-

nical knowledge that would help them manage their mining

operations and access the higher levels of the ASM value

chain. It also translates into a limited number of women

who can act as role models. In essence, ASM enterprises are

small businesses with the associated challenges of accessing

finance, developing business plans, developing and manag-

ing business, marketing and sales.

Being able to tally the numbers aids in effective planning.

However, most of the numbers of ASM are ‘guesstimates’,

and in all six countries, the agencies show different

numbers/statistics on the actual operators within ASM.

Effective development planning starts with a strategy which

accounts for who, where, what and how to address the

needs of a sector. Without knowing the actual numbers of

the diverse groups of women involved in different aspects

of the mining value chain, most attempts at formalization

would be unsuccessful. Tanzania, a classic example of a

country with some known and verifiable data, conducted

a baseline survey of the subsector in 2011. When it devel-

oped its Five Year Development Plan 2011/12-2015/16,

it committed to leasing mining equipment to small-scale

miners, developing medium-scale miners and providing

quasi banking institutions to address the needs of women

in the sector through innovative forms of financing such

as rotating savings and credit, community cooperatives and

Amina has been in the mining business for 10 years

Image: ECA

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