ARTISANAL AND SMALL-SCALE GOLD MINES IN BURKINA FASO ...

environmental problems, and to draw up an efficient intervention strategy for limiting future harm.
WORRYING HEALTH AND SAFETY ASPECTS
Working conditions on artisanal gold mining sites are commonly high-risk and very hard, especially for the
women and children who are omnipresent in the processing areas. Mortal or disabling accidents, though
rarely declared, are common on the mine sites. They occur during ground collapse, rock falls, and flooding,
and caused by badly propped-up pit walls, pillars that are too small, irregular pumping, the piling up of
waste too close to the pits, and poorly controlled use of explosives (like in Ghana, with a slow fuse and
matches). The last disaster given media coverage was in November 2001 at Guéguéré (Ioba Province),
where a pile of waste slid into a trench, officially burying 35 miners. Other, more long-term, hazards to
miners come from operating and ore-processing conditions. Their impact may be particularly heavy on
women, sometimes pregnant, and the small children with them. The inadvertent exposure to rock dust, as
well as to vapours from chemical products such as mercury, but also nitric acid 8 , can have disastrous
consequences such as severe neurological or lung diseases. Other, less severe, hazards include fumes
escaping from the mills, noise and vibrations.
During a rush, the living conditions for the entire mining community on a site can become dramatic.
Such communities commonly are cut off from all educational or health structures, in a temporary camp that
quickly becomes overpopulated and filthy, and where promiscuity is extreme: malnutrition, precarious
housing, a lack of drinking water, the absence of sufficient sanitary installations, all favour the development
of epidemics. In 1998, the Mogrenore site (Tiba District, Boulgou Province) became a cholera vector that
spread near to Ouagadougou (Toux and Thomassin, 1999). In 2002, living conditions at Nagrigré
(Zoundweogo province) made the authorities fear a similar outbreak. To this must be added the fact that
children do not attend school (they start at a very young age participating in artisanal gold mining work),
and the excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs (Nigerian “Blue-Blue” or “C14” amphetamines), and
prostitution serve as fertile soil for criminality and AIDS.
WHAT IS THE BEST DEVELOPMENT POLICY?
Faced with such economic and social stakes, choosing the right development policy is far from easy.
Would it be better to provide direct assistance to the traditional artisanal activity, or should one foster the
emergence of small enterprise that can disseminate better methods? Obviously, the role of an artisanal
mine in sustainable development will be quite variable. Moreover, the approach of providing support to a
community commonly is in conflict with providing support to a small mine. How to decide between these
two complementary approaches? An additional problem is that budget restrictions often force ‘triage’: the
support-of-communities approach entails the risk of too selective humanitarian-type assistance, but the
small-mine-support approach not uncommonly results in a few opportunistic persons profiting from the
development-aid funds, which, in the first case, at least are more equitably distributed (Jaques et al., 2003).
Regardless of the selected option, the resulting actions must imperatively be of suitable duration (i.e. at
least 4 to 5 years), and should privilege a general and participative approach to address absolutely all key
problems, whether social, cultural, technical, economic, financial, or environmental. Joint actions for
strengthening the institutional services and organizations in charge of the sector are of paramount
importance. It can be said that:
- Any assistance for Burkina artisans, thus addressing more than 100,000 individuals, must be based on
immediate-assistance actions, coupled with long-term prevention and educational actions.
- Any assistance of small-mine entrepreneurs in Burkina, addressing at most a hundred individuals, must
be based on short- to medium-term actions of expert assistance, and formal on-the-job training.
8 Hot nitric acid locally is used after flotation for the roasting of sulphuric oxides and the liberation of gold from concentrates.
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