Ghana: Community mining’s new concept, old problem

By Toma Imirhe | Gold Street Business

When President Nana Akufo-Addo, in 2019, officially launched the pilot stage of the new Community Mining Programme (CMP) at Wassa Akropong in the Western Region, Ghanaians exhaled a collective sigh of relief.

The CMP, an initiative in the making since 2018, has the potential to curb the environmentally destructive, and immensely dangerous practice of illegal small scale artisanal mining, widely known around the country as galamsey, which has polluted both farmlands and water bodies with equal attrition and claimed lots of lives, both through operational accidents and also as a result of clashes between practitioners and local community members, security forces and workers of large scale mining firms whose concessions have regularly been encroached upon by these illegal miners.

To be sure, the CMP initiative has been well designed. Some 4,500 small scale miners have been trained in sustainable mining practices at the University of Mines and Technology at Tarkwa and are now being allocated lands by government in the various mining districts nationwide to carry out artisanal mining in a regulated, environmentally friendly way….Full Story