Women play an unusually large role in Africa’s artisanal and small-scale mining sector, which employs nine-million Africans and supports some 54-million people, according to Nordic Africa Institute estimates, yet much of it is in the shadow economy, drawn into international criminal cartels at war with often equally-shady extractives multinationals.
Last June, SwissAid estimated that between 321 and 475 tons of gold alone derived from the informal (and thus usually criminalised) mining sector was smuggled out of Africa each year, with a value of between $24 and $35 bn. In South Africa, losses from gold, platinum, and coal amounted to an estimated $1.18bn in 2024, while 80% of the diamonds exported from the Central African Republic (CAR), for example, are processed by 400,000 mostly illegal miners for the black market.
Mining is sharply gendered: for example, back in 2001, I crawled by candlelight some 200 m deep along a seam of low-grade coal that was being mined by a six-man crew headed by retrenched miner Jerry Xegwane. The apartheid South African migrant labour system had recruited miners like Xegwane to live in all-male compounds in far-off mines where they worked for pitiable remittances for families they barely ever saw.
The result, decades later, is that while “illegal” male miners such as Xegwane may have sufficient skills to reopen, and safely stope, ventilate, and work old diggings and make up to what was then a reasonable $583 a month, unskilled women in the same area such as Julia Bozwana, working in unsafe diggings, that she told me had killed three women that year alone, earned a meagre $115 a month.
In August this year, advocacy umbrella the Minerals Council of South Africa, whose membership accounts for about 90% of the value produced by the sector, cautioned that despite women in mining representing 19% of all employees in the country’s sector in 2024 (up from 12% in 2018), gender-based violence, sexual harassment, and workplace bullying of women was rife.
Mining machismo was further reflected in gendered pay-gaps, with women earning just over three quarters what men do, in the restricted advancement of most women beyond the semi-skilled layer, in “non-inclusive facilities” at operations level, and with ill-fitting personal protective gear. And yet today, more than 70,000 women are active participants in the South African mining industry, up from 11,000 in 2002.
Maame Esi Eshun of the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET) in Accra, wrote in a 2016 paper that “Africa has the highest proportion of women artisanal miners (WAMs), with women averaging 40 to 50% of the artisanal mining workforce, compared to the world average of 30%.” And yet, she cautions that “very little is known about the role that women play in this sector, and its implications for conflict, peacebuilding, and development, especially in mineral-rich countries.
“WAMs in Africa undertake a variety of mining activities, including digging, rock crushing, grinding, panning, washing, and sieving,” she wrote, “with very few women represented in the management or technical aspects of mining operations… For some women, their involvement in artisanal mining is mostly clustered in support services – water haulers for mine sites, labourers, and suppliers of goods and services around the mining sites, including the sex trade.”
Eshun stressed that despite the higher percentage of women in artisanal over formal sector mining workforces – 50% in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), fully one-million women, and 45% in Uganda and the CAR, for instance – “most statistics do not even count women in artisanal mining at all.” The result was that the empowerment of women is “often overlooked in mining sector legislation, regulations, and policies,” so “there is an urgent need to formalise artisanal mining operations.”
Yet, she noted one of the key obstacles to regularising artisanal and illicit mining was the involvement in these extractives networks of political and military elites who were resistant to change, as is the case in countries such as the DRC. It is not hard to see that formalisation would require the implementation of expensive labour standards, natural resources management mechanisms, and safety procedures that would cut into the politico-military bosses’ profits.
The unregulated nature of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), Esi Eshun said, “makes it vulnerable to illegal dealings, corruption, and violence and conflict, especially in high-value minerals like diamonds, gold, cobalt, tin, and tungsten (often called conflict minerals).”
In a 2018 report for the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) on key challenges for women in ASM, Fitsum Weldegiorgis, Lynda Lawson, and Hannelore Verbrugge stressed that the regularisation of ASM was further bedevilled by a lack of access to finance.
“While banks readily lend to agricultural projects, they are often unwilling to lend to ‘risky’ ASM projects and rarely consider mines as collateral,” they wrote. “The difficulty in accessing finance is, however, considered to be higher for women due to cultural barriers, lack of traditional collateral, and their relatively lower income levels.” This, they said, was aggravated by laws in countries such as Botswana and Lesotho that prevent women from accessing loans unless authorised by a spouse or father.
Women also experience what the writers termed “geological exclusion”: “Geological mapping over five years in central and West Africa reveals that women typically participate in extraction processes only when a deposit is relatively easily accessible with small amounts of overburden” – as I have demonstrated in this article with the example of Jerry Xegwane versus Julia Bozwana.
“Women do go underground, but rarely when the commodity is of high value, which is often due to traditional reasons related to superstition. In the sapphire mining areas of Madagascar, women and their children are very often found re-sieving the tailings in the river after male miners have moved on; and women may be expected to give all their finds to male family members.”
Weldegiorgis and colleagues argue that this lack of access to the actual sites of production enables male miners to disguise the scale and value of what is extracted, and that this keeps women in a state of ignorance about ASM value-chains. Also, women’s relatively restricted access to technology such as cell phones seals much of the lucrative sales, trading, and beneficiation processes within the secretive masculine economic domain.
Sexist land-access and -ownership and inheritance practices and regulations across the continent also limit women’s ability to use or own mineral-rich lands, or to legally secure or inherit mining exploration and exploitation rights: “In Sierra Leone, even when a woman is the family head and owner of land, approval of the male relative is required before any decision can be made… In such a difficult situation, women typically enter into unwanted relationships with male miners to survive and hopefully save money for future investment.
“Male miners agree to supply them with raw material to sieve in return for sex in a relationship that rarely extends beyond the field. Such relationships lead to temporary marriages typically known as ‘gold marriages’… or vadin saffira (sapphire marriages) in Madagascar… These marriages bear no legal status in relation to land or property rights and typically exploit vulnerable women.”
In an effort to address their relative powerlessness – despite their numbers – in the ASM sector, women do form groups at national and local levels to represent female miners’ issues. For example, the International Women in Mining Alliance (IWIMA) has 92 member organisations from around the world, including Morocco, Senegal, Liberia, the DRC, Ethiopia, Botswana, and other African countries. Yet, the authors state, such bodies tend not to represent the hyper-exploited poorest female artisanal miners, but rather businesswomen already established in the legal sector; those bodies rooted in government, moreover, suffer from a lack of legitimacy.
Lastly, the authors argue that regularisation often actually criminalises many women miners due to their marginalisation: “Ironically, current efforts for formalisation and transparency can disadvantage women. For example, female gold traders in the DRC, the shashulere, play a crucial role in the supply chain, but because they are unregistered, recent changes in the mining law mean authorities consider them to be illegal and they are blamed “for fraudulent practices, including the trading of minerals outside the official circuit”.
Though they drive one of the continent’s largest shadow economies, which supports tens of millions of Africans, women in artisanal mining and those who intend to formalise their labours have a tough task ahead in combating traditional superstitions, prejudices, and exclusions to integrate them into formal economies.
Michael Schmidt is a veteran investigative journalist who focuses on African affairs, a best-selling non-fiction author, and a human rights rapporteur with field experience in 49 countries. He has reported from the bowels of many corporate and artisinal mines, and writes here in his capacity as an analyst for the Pan-African Justice Initiative (PAJI).
