2020  State of the Sector Report

Employment generation is likely ASM’s most universally acknowledged and defining feature. Since the 1980s, low educational and financial barriers to entry alongside easy recruitment from peers has made ASM a burgeoning economic activity in rural areas across the world. The ability of ASM to offer income in rural and impoverished settings, to propel global economic growth through mineral trade, and its high degree of informality, should motivate the international community to imagine the remarkable potential, if properly formalized, for more productive employment and decent work opportunities for tens of millions of people worldwide.

The 2020 Report shows how women remain largely invisible in the data on ASM. Yet, as powerfully outlined in the case studies, women make up significant portions of the ASM workforce and suffer from specific forms of workplace discrimination. Adverse side effects of mercury use, unequal pay for similar work, sexual harassment, and inability to own land or mining titles without permissions are but some of the ways in which women’s decent work outcomes are hampered. Advancing gender equality with respect to SDG8 and ASM is possible but measures are needed to close the gender data gap.

Using a fatality frequency rate model, the report found that the ASM sector had similar fatality rates in 1999 as USA’s and South Africa’s large-scale mining industries did in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Increased mechanization and concerted efforts to improve occupational health and safety (OHS) by governments and industrial mining companies has since led to dramatic safety improvements leading the industry to become one of the world’s most safety conscious, with a fatality frequency rate today of near zero (0.04). If the same efforts to improve the decent work agenda for industrial mining over the past 40 years were applied to ASM, the OHS record of the ASM sector could equally improve. This landmark finding challenges the fatalistic notion that ASM is inherently unsafe and makes improved OHS in ASM a collective responsibility which is both feasible and beneficial to all, raising the prospect for galvanized global efforts to save lives and provide decent work.  

The ASM sector is an engine of economic development in many rural contexts but due to its largely informal nature, its economic importance is often unrecognized in the SDG8 agenda. Data which underscore the economic importance of ASM are critical to understanding the ways in which finances fuel the sector’s production and growth, create linkages to other industries, and crucially, bolster the case for formalizing and supporting its activities. More disaggregated economic data are needed to showcase ASM’s economic contributions. National reporting and accounting systems are critical instruments in this regard, but there are only a few examples where ASM’s contributions to labor, revenues, and exports can be effectively measured (e.g. Guyana, Rwanda, Central African Republic, and Tanzania).

Better data on ASM’s economic contributions through improved national statistics can prove the value of ASM to national and global growth

Targeted interventions in relevant areas can help to improve miners’ lives and improve their pay, health, and well-being

Engaging the socio-economic network of actors involved in ASM can help overcome entrenched behaviors and change labor practices which continue to undermine OHS advancement in the sector 

Concerted partnerships with ASM associations advance the decent work agenda

 Focusing on women’s work in ASM is essential to the goal of decent
work for all