In the shade of a tree, a group of girls crush rocks, pounding away relentlessly with heavy stone clubs. It is the middle of the day here in Boulyiba, Burkina Faso. The dry season is almost at an end, and the temperature hovers above 100°F, yet these girls have a great deal of hard work ahead of them. Their father, Assane, has brought a whole pile of rocks back from a gold mine 15 kilometers from their village.
Assane and his daughters walk us through the backbreaking process. After crushing the rocks, they sift them and mix the fine powder in a pan with water. The heavier gold particles then drop to the bottom. Assane brings us one of the pans and points out a few sparkling specks, barely visible to the naked eye. He then disappears into his hut and returns with a gold lump the size of a walnut: the treasure he has accumulated over the course of seven months. He will sell this in the capital, Ouagadougou, for about $1,000.
Here in Burkina Faso, it is estimated that more than 600,000 children are working in about 600 informal mines spread across the country. But even these disturbing figures do not account for these girls (and many other children like them) who are working in their own villages away from the mining sites.
Burkina Faso is experiencing something of a gold rush, with many new mines opening in the last 30 years. But it is not the promise of dizzying wealth that has led farmers and herders to pick up spades and start digging; rather, it is the erosion of their traditional livelihoods.
Climate change has brought extreme weather events to this region, which have slashed the incomes of people here. Low rainfall alternating with flooding has destroyed crops and reduced harvests to the point where they can no longer sustain a family for more than a few months. This has forced villagers to find other sources of income. Some sell their cattle or try their hand at petty trading. Some migrate to urban centers or neighboring countries like Côte d’Ivoire. But more than anything else, people are reluctantly going into the mines.
As we spoke with other villagers in Boulyiba, some men said that they did not allow anyone under 20 to go to the larger mines nearby –not because of the poor labor conditions and serious safety issues there, but because they will never leave the mines once they get a taste of “quick” and “easy” money.
Life in Boulyiba is hard, the men say, and if all the young people head to the mines then there will be no one left to fix all the problems at home. They say the youth lack the maturity to understand that gold mining is not a permanent solution to their income problems; it will not rehabilitate their degraded lands or restore the livelihoods they once enjoyed. And yet the village girls continued to pound away at their rocks, few of which will yield any precious metal.
The Burkinabé government must provide incentives for these vulnerable communities to remain in their homes, rehabilitate their farms and livestock, and avoid distress migration to the mines. Without a focus on resiliency and capacity building, the people of this region will increasingly be forced to move in order to survive.
In the short term, however, it is imperative that the government provide rigorous oversight of artisanal mining sites, enforce laws against child labor, and improve safety conditions. It must strike a balance between depriving these communities of sorely needed income on the one hand, and risking their lives and their children’s futures on the other.