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Pact and partners discuss next steps for National Action Plan pilot in Sierra Leone

January 14, 2025
Bolaneh gold mine site in Tonkolili district, Sierra Leone. Photo credit: Jorden de Haan/Pact.
Bolaneh gold mine site in Tonkolili district, Sierra Leone. Photo credit: Jorden de Haan/Pact.

In November, the Regional Stakeholder Advisory Group, a platform for engaging key stakeholders in Sierra Leone’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector, held its fifth meeting at the Tonkolili District Council in Magboraka. The meeting focused on sustainability of progress made through the Piloting National Action Plan Implementation in Sierra Leone project.  

Sierra Leone’s burgeoning ASGM sector provides critical livelihoods for women and young men but is largely informal and associated with a range of social and environmental challenges, including mercury use. The project supports the Government of Sierra Leone by implementing its plan for reducing mercury use and improving the governance of Sierra Leone’s ASGM sector, including formal gold trade and exporting, focused in Tonkolili District and Northern Sierra Leone. As part of the project, Pact, GIZ, relevant government institutions, and local stakeholders, established a Regional Stakeholder Advisory Group to engage all stakeholders on topics such as regulations, environment, health, safety, business development, taxes, gender, and other key social issues. 

During the meeting, which was led by Joseph Smith, Pact’s National Project Coordinator in Freetown, Pact presented key project updates and opened a discussion about sustainability. Nearly all participants agreed that the pilot project, which helped establish the country’s first formal ASGM associations, facilitated women’s access to minerals, and established a mercury-free mineral processing plant in Tonkolili, is a springboard that other initiatives should build upon. For example, participants discussed the PlanetGOLD project that pursues the same objectives in Sierra Leone as the pilot project, noting that similar organizations should effectively collaborate and leverage the project’s successes and lessons learned, rather than operating in silos. The discussion also reflected a consensus that after the project’s end, the Advisory Group could steer ASGM initiatives forward under the leadership of its co-chairs and the Tonkolili District Council.  

In addition to sustainability plans, other discussions during the meeting focused on access to finance and formal gold markets. Gold dealers and exporters – represented through the Gold Dealers and Exporters Association, the first of its kind in Sierra Leone, which Pact helped establish with the objective to promote formal gold trading – made notable points underscoring the importance of scaling the project’s achievements in establishing associations, land access, licensing, and other steps of the formalization process for achieving access to both finance and markets. Despite being invited to participate in the meeting, participants underscored the limited interest from traditional financial institutions in financing ASGM. Gold dealer representatives noted that a more realistic approach could be prefinancing of ASGM associations by international gold buyers in formal gold supply chains, which reflects the prefinancing arrangements currently in place in the region’s informal gold buying networks. 

In preparation for the conclusion of the project in the coming months, Pact and the Advisory Group co-chairs are developing a project exit strategy, which will be presented in the Advisory Group’s next meeting in February 2025. 

Read more updates in the latest project bulletin. The project is financed through GIZ’s Regional Resource Governance in West Africa and co-funded by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union.