01Gender equality (SDG 5)
Women are about a third of the global ASM workforce, and close to half in parts of Africa, yet the law rarely sees them. The 2023 State of the Sector report made gender its theme for the first time, with primary surveys of more than 1,900 people.
Women cluster in processing, transport, trading and services around the pits, work that is lower-paid, less secure and frequently unrecorded, so it disappears from both the statistics and the policy. The same report found women doing 26% more unpaid domestic work than men and cited a 90 times higher mortality risk for women miners. Gender-blind legislation then locks them out of permits, land and finance. The fixes are known: gender-sensitive mining law, recognition of women’s roles, women-led cooperatives, and Women-in-Mining networks such as AWIMA, whose first Africa summit met in 2024.
Estimates of women’s share vary widely by method, from 18% (World Bank) to 50% (IGF), which is itself a sign of how thinly women’s ASM work is measured.
Source: Delve / World Bank & Pact, 2023 State of the ASM Sector (SDG 5); IGF.
02Mercury & the environment (SDG 12)
Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is the single largest source of human-caused mercury emissions to the air, around 38% of the total, because miners use mercury to bind gold from ore. It is worth keeping two numbers apart: ASGM uses roughly 2,000 tonnes of mercury a year, but emits about 700 to 1,000 tonnes of it to the air (UNEP’s 2018 assessment gives ~838 t for 2015; a 2022 academic inventory estimates ~975 t for 2021). Up to 15 million miners are directly exposed, and as many as 100 million people downstream.
The Minamata Convention commits governments to reduce and where feasible eliminate mercury in ASGM through National Action Plans; about 35 had been submitted by late 2025, and the 2025 COP-6 pushed gold-supply-chain transparency, a path to control mercury compounds, and a global dental-amalgam phase-out. Mercury-free methods (gravity concentration, borax, vortex and retort capture) exist and work; the barriers are cost, training and access. The planetGOLD programme (UNEP, UNIDO, GEF) now runs in 27 countries and reports over 31 tonnes of mercury prevented. Beyond mercury, ASM brings deforestation, river siltation and land degradation, from the Amazon to Ghana, that responsible-mining standards aim to curb.
03Child labour
The ILO estimates around a million children work in mining and quarrying worldwide, a share of them in ASM, in hazardous tasks no child should do. The 2024 ILO-UNICEF global estimates counted 138 million children in child labour overall; mining sits inside the "industry" share and is not separately broken out, so any precise ASM child count should be treated with caution.
Gold is the larger story by headcount: a large share of the global total is in Africa’s artisanal gold mines, with the Sahel alone accounting for about a quarter of mining child labour and children making up 30 to 50% of the gold workforce in Burkina Faso and Niger.
Bans alone tend to push families further into informality. Durable progress comes from tackling the causes (household poverty, the absence of schools, informality) alongside monitoring and remediation systems that keep children out of the pits while protecting the family’s income, such as the ILO-USDOL GALAB project and the Global Battery Alliance child-labour fund.
04Health & safety (SDG 8)
Decent work is the 2020 report’s frame. ASM’s hazards are stark: pit collapses, dust and silicosis, mercury and chemical exposure, and no protective equipment. Informality compounds it, no contracts, no insurance, no recourse.
- Physical, unsupported pits and tunnels, falls, flooding, rockfall.
- Chemical, mercury (gold) and cyanide, plus silica and lead dust.
- Economic, price-taking, debt bondage and exposure to violence in conflict-affected sites.
Cooperatives, basic safety training and equipment, and legal market access measurably reduce these risks, which is why occupational health and safety and formalisation are two sides of one coin.
05Formalisation
Formalisation is the master theme: most other harms shrink when miners gain legal rights, fair markets and organisation. The State of the Sector framework sets out three pillars, a workable regulatory framework, finance and technical support, and labour standards and social organisation.
06Critical minerals & the energy transition
The shift to clean energy multiplies demand for the very minerals ASM supplies, cobalt and copper for batteries, tin and tantalum for electronics, and lithium and others coming up. That turns ASM into a strategic question: the world cannot decarbonise around it.