Artisanal Mines, Economic Development and Social Impact

Introduction

The adoption of green energy technologies worldwide is going to have significant consequences for mineral demand in the near future. The booming sector of artisanal and small-scale mines (ASM) that employs around 40 million people represents about 20% of the global gold and diamond supply, 25% of tantalum and tin, and up to 80% of sapphire. Those numbers make the ASM sector a pivotal actor in the energy transition.

Project Aim

The aim of the ArtiMinDev project is to analyze the economic and social impacts of ASM in sub-Saharan African countries. Up until now, the absence of exhaustive time-varying information on the location of ASM has prevented researchers in social sciences from precisely quantifying the contribution of this activity to economic development.

Project Ambition

The ambition of this project is twofold:

1. Mapping ASM Activities: I intend to map the opening/closing of ASM in sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000-2020 with exact information on location (GPS coordinates). Two other crucial pieces of information are also collected: the size and the mineral extracted from each ASM. I will use machine learning techniques and satellite image time series to identify sediment and open pit-mining activities.

2. Impact Analysis: Equipped with this ground-breaking dataset, I aim to provide systematic and large-scale evidence of the impact of ASM on:

   • Violence and conflict
   • Environmental degradation and health
   • Internal migration

Methodology and Relevance

The proposal’s objectives, grounded in quantitative economics, span several literatures from a wide variety of disciplines by combining state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and remote sensing data. I expect the methodologies and the results to push the research frontier in several dimensions.

Moreover, the conclusions drawn from the project would be highly relevant for policy-makers and NGOs aiming to improve the monitoring of those mining activities and their impacts on conflict, health, and environmental degradation.