ASM accounts for most mining employment in Southern Africa and directly impacts the rural livelihoods of millions of people, yet the internal dynamics and drivers of ASM are often little understood. The Africa Mining Vision (2009), as well as national-level policy documents, recognize ASM as a potential source of employment as well as state revenue through taxation. Contradictory gender dynamics, in which women have greater access to ASM opportunities but are confronted with exploitation, exclusion and weak protection by the law, underscore the gender dimensions of pervasive socio-economic inequalities. Broader environmental changes are also relevant: climate change is predicted to have negative impacts on the agriculture sector in Southern Africa, a region warming at twice the global average. ASM represents a key alternative to farming income.

ASM’s importance for critical minerals’ extraction is expanding, driven by higher mineral prices, instability in African agricultural and diminished formal sector employment; for example, ASM now contributes 20% of the DRC’s cobalt output and 98% of its cobalt workforce Zambia and Zimbabwe also host significant ASM copper, cobalt, manganese and chrome activity. This increasing activity is raising new challenges and exacerbating existing ones. Negative environmental impacts, risks to miners’ health and the marginalization of ASM are calling into question both the “greenness” of low-carbon technologies and the gendered and geopolitical inequalities reproduced at the lower levels of the critical minerals’ value chain in mining affected communities. While ASM actors have called for the sector’s formalization as a means of strategically incorporating ASM into national mining systems, governments and large-scale miners have resisted change. As global critical mineral demand continues to rise and African ASM extraction expands, there is an urgent need for national policy engagement around the linked issues of ASM’s formalization, sustainable small-scale mining and the equitable distribution of benefits downwards along local critical mineral value chains.

This cluster will investigate the implications of rising demand for ASM’s inclusion in critical mineral value chains under the constraints of informalisation; the opportunities for ASM/large-scale cooperation around new mining investments; and the potential of new global certification schemes for improving health, safety, and particularly the gender dynamics of ASM.

‍

Mapping of Critical Minerals ASM

• Ownership Structures/Capital Intensity
• Legal codes and formalization
• Tracking of ASM CMs’ intersections with international value chains
• Intersections with health and its determinants, gender and local livelihoods

Understanding distributional outcomes as ASM/community level

• Impacts of CM extraction on rural livelihoods, integrated rural production
• Tracking institutional innovations and outcomes at different institutional levels of the State

Understanding CM extraction by Small-Scale Mechanised mines

• Challenges faced involving State services, value chain access, processing, pricing, labour management, etc.
• Implications of renewed State emphasis on ‘domestic resource mobilization’ and ‘mining diversification’ across the region