Estimating the Footprint and Impact of Artisanal Mining in Africa

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is a significant but often unregulated economic sector in sub-Saharan Africa. The lack of comprehensive monitoring of ASM activity hinders efforts to understand and address its environmental and social impacts or promote its sustainable development. We address this gap by creating the first high-resolution estimate of ASM’s spatial footprint across sub-Saharan Africa. We plan to use our high-resolution predictions of ASM activity to estimate the sector’s environmental and economic impacts.

Here’s a first working paper detecting ASM across twenty countries in SSA.