Livelihood Diversification and the Expansion of Artisanal Mining in Rural Tanzania

Abstract

This paper provides an extended analysis of livelihood diversification in rural Tanzania, with special emphasis on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Over the past decade, this sector of industry, which is labour-intensive and comprises an array of rudimentary and semi-mechanized operations, has become an indispensable economic activity throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, providing employment to a host of redundant public sector workers, retrenched large-scale mine labourers and poor farmers. In many of the region's rural areas, it is overtaking subsistence agriculture as the primary industry. Such a pattern appears to be unfolding within the Morogoro and Mbeya regions of southern Tanzania, where findings from recent research suggest that a growing number of smallholder farmers are turning to ASM for employment and financial support. It is imperative that national rural development programmes take this trend into account and provide support to these people.

Where artisanal mines and forest meet: Socio-economic and environmental impacts in the Congo Basin

“…Diversification of livelihoods, recommended as way to improve the sustainability of ASM (Hinton et al ., 2003), is clearly nothing new to TNS miners, who, although largely dependent on mining, use up to six activities to earn additional income. This matches other ASM studies (Kwai and Hilson, 2010). Complementary studies in the TNS confirm that income diversification is common, particularly to obtain highly sought‐after cash (Gwet, 2004; Sandker et al ., 2009).…”

Artisanal Gold Mining and Surface Water Pollution in Ghana: Have the Foreign Invaders Come to Stay?

“…Again, local markets for high-value/low volume commodities especially gold often lack transparency and formal trading chains. This provides the ideal setup for extraordinary profits in grey or black markets, such as smuggling by unscrupulous middlemen, some of who have direct ties to those with the economic and political means to perpetuate the marginal and informal condition of ASM so crucial for their businesses (Kwai and Hilson, 2010).…”

Artisanal gold and transformational exchange: toward a public–private partnership in Tanzania

“…Another consideration is that as a network of purchasing offices materializes -PPP branches in the fashion of APM's office system - 11 Public Private Partnerships evade easy definition. Lindner and Roseau describe PPPs as complex organizations that pull together ''for profit companies, private non-profit organizations (in a competitive environment or in a monopoly situation), as well as public sector non-profit organizations'' [45, p. 2].…”

“…11 A PPP could be authorized by the central bank to call for and to sanction cooperatives and small groups of miners, in cooperation with the mining and minerals ministry and civil society agents who are familiar with conditions on the ground. It would purchase gold through a field office network from individuals or groups of miners, as well as brokers and dealers, and would be the only agent permitted to export raw or preliminarily processed gold.…”

“…Although experts agree that reliable and empirically established figures are not available, informally, the numbers are put as high as one million, against a population of 40 million [9]. The sector is expanding and there is some evidence that in certain regions of Tanzania (especially Morogoro and Mbeya) small-scale mining has already replaced subsistence agriculture as the primary source of income [10,11]. The data are consistent with evidence that rural workers, over several decades, have been diversifying into non-agricultural sources of income [1].…”