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Abstract
For decades, the rural development and poverty
alleviation agenda in sub-Saharan Africa has emphasised
support for smallholder farming and little else. Foreign
large-scale miners and other industrial operators have
complied, establishing agriculture-support services and
programs for communities located near their activities.
However, these interventions have yielded mixed results,
largely because millions of rural African families have,
over the course of the past two decades, diversified
their income portfolios away from agriculture. One of
the more popular destinations has been artisanal and
small-scale mining (ASM) — low-tech, labour intensive mineral extraction
and processing. This is a rapidly-growing informal sector of industry that
provides a range of job opportunities; it has played an important role in
nourishing debilitated smallholder farming activities, economically, over the
past decade. In this era of globalisation, subsistence farming and rural nonfarm
activities such as ASM have taken on very different roles: the latter
have become, in most cases, a principal source of income, including in many
rural sections of sub-Saharan Africa; increasingly, the former has taken on
more of a food security role for the rural household. This paper proposes
measures for supporting and formalising ASM in rural sub-Saharan Africa.