In recent years, gold mining has emerged as a significant environmental and public-health concern across sub-Saharan Africa, with its impacts increasingly concentrated in fragile ecosystems and underserved rural communities. Satellite imagery of artisanal gold fields in Ghana reveals extensive deforestation and widespread flooded mining pits. This visual pattern is not an isolated case. Gold-rich regions in countries like Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have experienced a sharp uptick in both artisanal and semi-industrial mining activities, driven by a convergence of global gold demand, weak regulatory enforcement, and local economic precarity.
Governments and investors have often promoted gold extraction as a pathway to rural development, job creation, and foreign-exchange revenue. In theory, mineral wealth was meant to deliver paved roads, electrification, and community reinvestment. In practice, however, the profits of Africa’s gold boom have rarely reached local populations. Instead, the promised prosperity has been replaced by degraded landscapes, toxic pollution, and deepening inequality—symptoms of extractive economies that privilege short-term gain over sustainable development.
Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in Mozambique’s Manica Province. In September 2025, authorities suspended all gold extraction following independent tests that revealed toxic concentrations of mercury and arsenic in major water bodies, including the Chicamba Dam and the Revuè River. Mercury levels exceeded the national legal limit by more than sixteenfold, prompting the Manica provincial government and national environmental agencies to classify the contamination as an environmental disaster. These pollutants, commonly used in unregulated artisanal gold processing, have contaminated local drinking water, poisoned fish stocks, and rendered farmland infertile, exacerbating food insecurity and rural displacement.
A parallel crisis is unfolding in the DRC’s Haut-Uélé Province, where, since 2021, Chinese-backed “semi-industrial” gold syndicates operating without legal permits have excavated over 250 kilometers of rivers and streams using heavy machinery to dredge riverbeds and clear surrounding forests. These operations have left behind chains of flooded pits, disrupted hydrological systems, and exposed nearby populations to likely mercury and cyanide contamination. The full extent of this pollution remains undocumented due to a lack of state monitoring. Indigenous Mbuti communities report forced displacement from ancestral territories and the loss of access to essential forest and river resources.
These cases exemplify how unregulated mining threatens Africa’s environment, public health, and human rights. The crises in Mozambique and the DRC highlight a broader regional emergency: the pursuit of gold, often cloaked in the promise of economic development, has instead generated systemic environmental degradation and governance failures, leaving local communities to bear the enduring consequences.
Environmental and Health Impacts of Gold Mining
Mozambique’s Manica Province
Manica is Mozambique's leading gold-producing region, home to more than 10,000 artisanal miners who rely on mercury to extract gold. Recent government studies identified dangerously high levels of contamination: rivers and the Chicamba Dam contain mercury and arsenic concentrations far exceeding national safety thresholds. In some areas, mercury levels in local waters reached 16 times the legal limit. The environmental fallout has devastated local livelihoods. Approximately 500 fishermen have abandoned the Revue and Chicamba rivers due to pollution, and populations of tilapia and other fish species have collapsed. Irrigation water has also become unsafe, with hundreds of families reporting crop failures linked to toxic runoff. Local farmers echo similar concerns, describing how once-fertile soils have become unusable: “The water has been dirty and full of mud. Even if I watered lettuce or onions, they wouldn’t grow because the soil would dry out—the water has too much sediment,” one farmer in Manica told Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The long-term health risks are grave: mercury is a potent neurotoxin (one of WHO’s “10 Chemicals of Major Public Health Concern”) that impairs brain, kidney, and developmental functions, and arsenic exposure raises cancer and organ-damage risks. In sum, mercury-laden gold mining has contaminated Manica’s water and soil, precipitating fish kills, crop losses, and chronic public health threats.
Haut-Uélé, Democratic Republic of Congo
Since 2020, northeastern Haut-Uélé province has seen a “gold rush” of illegal semi-industrial mining often driven by foreign investors. Investigations by PAX For Peace, a Dutch peace organization, indicate that Chinese nationals, collaborating with Congolese partners and enjoying protection from army and police forces, have led these operations. The landscape is scarred with a chain of flooded pits—many tens of meters wide—and access roads carved through forests. These abandoned pits now present significant drowning hazards, with reports suggesting that dozens of miners, including children, may have perished. Indigenous Mbuti communities report being forcibly displaced from ancestral lands as waterways are destroyed. Although comprehensive studies are lacking, PAX cautions that mercury and cyanide are commonly used in these unregulated gold-processing operations, posing risks to water quality across the wider Congo River Basin. In short, Haut-Uélé’s illicit mines are degrading forests, poisoning waterways, and displacing communities with minimal oversight.
Regional Implications
The environmental and social harms of artisanal gold mining extend far beyond these provincial case studies. Globally, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM), accounts for roughly 37% of anthropogenic mercury emissions, making it the single largest source of mercury pollution, underscoring its status as the world’s largest single source of mercury pollution. In Southern and central Africa, contaminated rivers, decimated fisheries, and failing farms combined with malnutrition and disease have eroded the social and ecological fabric of rural life. Communities lose access to clean water and sustainable livelihoods as toxic mining waste, known as tailings, seep into rivers and groundwater. These tailings often contain mercury, arsenic, and other heavy metals that persist in the environment, poisoning fish, crops, and drinking water long after mining has stopped. As people consume contaminated food and water over time, chronic health conditions such as neurological damage, kidney failure, and developmental disorders become increasingly common. These cumulative burdens, from lost crops and fish to mercury poisoning erode food security, strain public health systems, and force families from their land, deepening poverty and dependence on unstable mining income. In turn, governments lose revenue and capacity for infrastructure, education, and climate adaptation—undercutting progress towards sustainable development across the region.
Governance Failures and Corruption
The crisis in Mozambique’s Manica Province reflects deep regulatory deficiencies. Both formally licensed firms and informal or illegal prospectors have long operated with minimal governmental oversight, despite existing laws meant to constrain them. Although mining laws mandate post-extraction site restoration, environmental monitoring and enforcement remained sporadic, under-resourced, and largely reactive until the situation reached critical levels.
Only in late 2025 did the government move decisively: the cabinet announced the suspension of all mining licences in Manica Province, following a security‑force investigation by the Defence and Security Forces (FDS) that reported “critical levels” of pollution in rivers and the main dam (with rivers described as reddish, cloudy, and opaque). At the same time, provincial prosecutors acknowledge that dozens of environmental crimes—ranging from water and soil pollution, deforestation, toxic waste dumping, to the use of child labour in mining operations—have been documented, yet no arrests have been made to date. This persistent lack of accountability has fueled widespread mistrust among local communities, who perceive wealthy companies and foreign operators as exploiting resources with impunity while violations go unpunished.
The DRC’s situation is even more deeply entrenched. Investigations by organizations such as PAX (and other monitoring bodies) found that illegal gold networks operate with the complicity of state actors. Chinese-led syndicates conduct large-scale operations that are effectively shielded by elements within the security forces or local administrations. These arrangements facilitate rampant tax evasion and gold smuggling while marginalizing legal mining enterprises. According to a 2021 Interpol report on illicit gold flows in Central Africa: “criminal groups including high-ranking political, military and economic actors … partner with foreign companies, abuse or corrupt public administration … and under-declare gold production to evade taxes”. Although these syndicates generate substantial profits, neither local communities nor the Congolese treasury benefits, as environmental regulations are routinely disregarded. In short, the DRC’s gold boom is ensnared in classic “resource curse” dynamics: official corruption and political patronage enable powerful actors to exploit minerals with impunity. Weak institutions not only fail to prevent environmental degradation but actively perpetuate it by driving extraction further into the informal sector. The result is a vicious cycle of ecological destruction, where communities are left powerless to protect their lands and water from plunder.
Global Drivers and International Accountability
Africa’s mining surge is intimately tied to the global economic dynamics. Record-high gold prices since 2020 have rendered even remote or lawless deposits extremely profitable. A major investigation finds that Chinese and other foreign syndicates have capitalized on this trend, transporting excavators, crushers, and mobile cyanide-processing units to illegal sites from Indonesia to Ghana, thereby accelerating the degradation of rainforests and waterways. These transnational “mining mafias” routinely disregard environmental regulations, bribing or circumventing officials, while sustained demand from Asian and Middle Eastern markets ensures continued profitability.
At the same time, international norms have had limited impact on the ground. Both Mozambique and the DRC have formally ratified the Minamata Convention, which seeks to phase out mercury use, yet enforcement remains weak, and artisanal miners continue to rely on mercury-based extraction. Mercury is used because it easily binds with fine gold particles to form an amalgam, which miners then heat to vaporize the mercury and recover the gold. The process is cheap and simple but releases toxic mercury vapor and runoff into soil and water, contaminating fish and crops. Safer alternatives—such as gravity concentration, borax amalgamation, or cyanidation under controlled conditions—exist, but they require equipment, training, and stable oversight that many informal miners lack.
Without technical capacity or political will, local authorities struggle even to document informal mining operations. Meanwhile, global gold trade obscures accountability. Investigations warn that most “conflict” gold from Africa ends up in Dubai’s open markets, where lax oversight and the famed Gold Souk market let dirty gold blend into legal supply chains. A substantial amount of illicit African gold is smuggled through intermediaries into the UAE and India, then refined and sold worldwide with no provenance checks. In effect, a transnational extraction network has emerged in which profits flow outward to global markets, while the environmental damage and health burdens remain localized within Africa.
Conclusion and Policy Implications
The tragedies unfolding in Manica and Haut-Uélé underscore the hidden toll of unregulated mining in fragile states. Reversing these trends requires action at multiple levels. First, African governments must strengthen local governance by rigorously enforcing environmental and labor regulations, suspending illegal operations, auditing corporate compliance, and holding violators criminally accountable. Mines should remain closed until clean-up and rehabilitation are underway. Second, development programs should support alternative livelihoods by providing rural communities with incentives beyond gold and panning such as sustainable agriculture, agroforestry, or eco-tourism. These programs should also offer training and microcredit to reduce poverty-driven dependence on toxic mining. Third, international supply chains must be reformed so that gold-consuming countries and companies demand traceability and adhere to rigorous due diligence frameworks such as Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidance for minerals supplied from conflict-affected and high-risk areas. The UAE, India, and other trading hubs should cooperate to close loopholes by policing smuggling routes and auditing refineries. Finally, communities must be empowered to participate in mining decisions through transparent revenue-sharing and community monitoring mechanisms that align extraction with the public interest. Civil society reporting and satellite monitoring—such as the International Peace Information Service (IPIS) mapping of artisanal mining sites in the DRC and PAX environmental reporting—can further expose abuses and drive accountability.
Without a concerted domestic and international response, Africa’s rivers and forests will face escalating contamination, further entrenching poverty and public health crises. The sustainable management of Africa’s mineral wealth is not merely an environmental imperative, it is a matter of justice: ensuring that all communities can enjoy clean water, food security, and a healthy environment rather than pay the price for others’ gold.
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