Artisanal & Small-Scale Mining · Global Data Hub

The hidden mining sector, gathered, charted and opened up.

Artisanal and small-scale mining feeds the livelihoods of around 150 million people and supplies a fifth of the world’s gold. Yet it is one of the least-measured parts of the global economy. The ASM Hub pulls the best-available evidence into one modern, navigable place.

Open, source-led referenceGlobal coverage · 80+ countriesLast reviewed July 2026

≈45M

People work directly in ASM

Across 80+ countries, roughly an order of magnitude larger than the large-scale mining workforce.

Delve/World Bank/Pact 2020; IGF

150M+

Depend on ASM for a living

Direct miners plus families and service economies. The World Bank’s 2024 framework gives a wider labour-value-chain figure (225M+ in the report; 315M in its communications).

Delve 2020; World Bank 2024

~20%

Of the world’s gold

Newly-mined gold; plus ~25% of tin, ~26% of tantalum and ~80% of sapphires. Artisanal cobalt, once ~10–20% of DRC supply (c.2018), slumped to under 2% in 2024.

State of the ASM Sector; Cobalt Institute 2024

~1/3

Of the workforce are women

Up to half in parts of Africa, yet 14 of 21 mining codes reviewed are gender-blind.

Delve 2023

The premise of this hub is simple: complete, accurate and reliable data is a precondition for any serious intervention in ASM, for formalisation, for responsible sourcing, for protecting miners and the environment. Where the numbers are missing, bad policy fills the gap.

01What you’ll find here

The ASM Hub rebuilds the spirit of the World Bank and Pact’s Delve platform in a faster, more modern interface, and extends it with thematic deep-dives. It is organised around four things people actually come looking for: the shape of the sector, the data, the places, and the issues.

Start here

The sector, explained

What ASM is, how big it is, what it produces and why it matters. A grounding primer.

Read the primer Data

Explore the data

Headline indicators, the mineral mix, and ASM’s share of world supply, chart by chart.

Open the dashboard Places

Country data

A sortable, filterable table of the 35 best-documented of 80+ ASM countries, with profiles for the big producers.

Browse countries Issues

Themes

Gender, mercury and the environment, child labour, safety, formalisation, critical minerals.

Explore themes Library

Resource library

The State of the Sector reports, standard survey instruments, and key references.

Open the library Join in

Contribute data

ASM data is crowdsourced. See the data standards and how to add to the record.

How to contribute

02Why it matters now

ASM is no longer a footnote to industrial mining. It is the top non-farm rural employer in most mineral-rich countries, and it sits directly on the supply chains of the clean-energy transition, cobalt and copper for batteries, tin and tantalum for electronics, gold for everything. The same sites carry real harms: mercury pollution, unsafe pits, child labour and informality that locks miners out of fair prices and legal protection.

Top non-farm rural employer in most mineral-rich statesASGM is the world’s largest source of man-made mercury (emissions to air)~38%Informal share of ASM80–90%Children in mining (ILO)~1M

The honest caveat. Every number on this hub is an estimate. ASM is informal, mobile and often remote; censuses miss it. We show ranges, date our figures, flag how solid each country’s data is, and treat the data gap itself as the first problem to solve. How we handle uncertainty →

ASM data is a commons. Help build it.

The record only improves when the people closest to the sites add what they know. Researchers, cooperatives, government agencies and NGOs can all contribute datasets and documents.

Contribute data Explore the data first

Headline sources: World Bank & Pact, State of the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Sector (2019, 2020, 2023); IGF, Global Trends in ASM; ILO; UN Environment Programme; IPIS; USGS. Full references on the resource library.