Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM) and COVID-19: Responding to the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on the lives and livelihoods of a substantial portion of the women and men involved in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). The pandemic—and resulting government responses—has upended lives in many of the communities that rely on ASM, presenting significant challenges to the miners and their families, to local authorities, to national governments, and to local and international partners, as all struggle to address and contain a health crisis the scale and nature of which hasn’t been seen in over a century.

This brief—based on interviews with representatives of IGF member country governments and ASM communities around the world—outlines some of the main challenges to ASM sector support and regulation in the context of the global pandemic and points tentatively to how governments can move forward with effective ASM sector management in the coming months. While this contribution strives to bring together data gathered globally from multiple institutions into a digestible format, it should be qualified that each country and locality has been impacted differently by the coronavirus; policy definition should therefore always be developed to account for these unique realities.