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The GemFair Way 2021 – creating scalable solutions to support the livelihoods of artisanal miners

14 Jan 2022, Steve Allan

Despite the pandemic, 2021 proved to be a strong year for GemFair. We furthered efforts to support our members and their communities in dealing with the impacts of the pandemic and continued to scale the programme and support the delivery of De Beers Group’s Building Forever sustainability goals. We now have 211 mine sites participating in GemFair and have delivered training to more than 500 people. We also achieved an important milestone in bringing our first dedicated parcels of GemFair-sourced rough diamonds to market via De Beers Group Auctions.

At GemFair, De Beers Group’s Building Forever sustainability framework sits at the heart of everything we do. In late 2020, De Beers announced 12 ambitious sustainability goals to guide its focus over the decade to 2030, with one of the goals being to deliver scalable solutions to improve the livelihoods of artisanal miners. GemFair will play a key role in the achievement of this goal through our efforts on the ground within the artisanal mining communities of West Africa. However, GemFair will also play an important role in achieving a number of other Building Forever goals, which are focused on leading ethical practices, protecting the natural world, accelerating equal opportunity and partnering for thriving communities.

Addressing food security by returning abandoned ASM pits to productive use

One such example of a programme that supports a number of the Building Forever goals is our ASM land reclamation and sustainable agriculture pilot programme. With so many people in Kono District of Sierra Leone struggling with the issue of food insecurity due to the ongoing impacts of the pandemic and high levels of inflation, the GemFair team decided to take decisive action. Throughout the pandemic, GemFair has provided more than 4,700 food parcels to the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) community in Kono, but in 2021 the team sought to implement a more sustainable solution to tackle long-term food insecurity.

The reclamation and sustainable agriculture programme involves bringing abandoned mined pits back to productive use for growing crops, which in turn helps to create local employment, increase food security, and enable local communities to generate income from selling those crops at the local market.

Most of the ASM sites in Kono are abandoned upon the completion of mining activity, which results in deep pits left in the ground and a waste of otherwise productive land, while also posing a safety risk and serving as a breeding ground for water-borne diseases.

The GemFair team therefore decided to implement a pilot programme to better understand the practicalities of reclaiming these ‘mined out’ areas. In consultation with local stakeholders, we selected three areas, each approximately one acre in size, to test our understanding.  Local artisanal diggers and farmers were hired to work on backfilling the land and it was then handed over to the community along with seedlings suitable for the area.

We’re now partnering with members of neighboring villages – 80 per cent of whom are women – to cultivate the land. The crops produced are for the villagers to keep and GemFair pays their daily wage. The project has seen significant success – with more than 1,000 direct and indirect beneficiaries to date – and will be rolled out to more areas in the coming year.

Farmer collecting maize from a recent harvest


Supporting members to operate and grow their businesses through fair and formal finance

Another highlight of the past year was the continued success of GemFair’s Forward Purchase programme, an essential component in empowering miners in the ASM sector to grow and formalise their businesses. As part of the GemFair journey, we have learned that artisanal miners often have little to no access to formal financing opportunities due to high levels of informality within the sector and a lack of available credit. This, in turn, leads to an unfavorable environment for businesses to thrive.

GemFair’s Forward Purchase programme is our way of helping address the gap that exists in accessing formal finance for participants in the ASM sector. Our team studied the way informal financing is currently structured in the sector and adopted useful components of this, while ensuring GemFair extended finance on fair, predictable and mutually agreeable terms.

Our capacity building endeavors also continued in 2021, with GemFair’s partnership with GIZ and the Mano River Union being extended so that more stakeholders could benefit from the training sessions focused on advancing ASM standards in West Africa. As part of our capacity building endeavors, the team hosted a foundation Diamond Valuation training course where participants from civil society and the mining sector were introduced to rough valuation fundamentals that will help them to better determine the value of a diamond.

The GemFair team achieved another major milestone in 2021 where, for the first time, ethically sourced GemFair diamonds were brought to market as dedicated, traceable parcels, sold via De Beers Group Auctions. This marked a major step forward for GemFair and the wider ASM sector, demonstrating both that it is possible to bring ethically sourced ASM diamonds to market in a sustainable way, and that there is genuine interest in ethically sourced ASM diamonds.

2021 was a difficult year with the ongoing pandemic. However, the GemFair team powered through, extending its influence on the ground to help create sustainable solutions to formalise the ASM sector, tackle food security, increase capacity development to ensure a stronger rebound after the pandemic, and bring the first dedicated parcels of GemFair diamonds to market.

Artisanal miner attending a GemFair app training session

I would encourage you to read more about our progress this year in the latest edition of our annual report, The GemFair Way.


Steve Allan
Head of GemFair