Every morning, women in tattered clothes and slippers emerge from their homes in Masara, a village in the southwestern county of Migori, Kenya. Each carries a packed lunch of porridge in a calabash, along with a small bottle of mercury and a basin in which to sieve crushed rock — standard tools of the trade at the mines they’re headed to.
The women of Migori have mastered the art of crushing the rock coming out of the mining pits — some more than 200m deep — and then sieving it to extract gold. It’s hard labour, born of necessity.
"I am a single parent of five children," says Mary Atieno. "I’ve been in the mining business for 20 years, coming here every morning to crush and sieve rocks to extract gold."
Atieno works at Uyoma Mine in Masara. Like all of Kenya’s artisanal mines, it is owned by a family who were evicted from their ancestral lands during colonial rule and returned after independence. The mine consists of two tunnels 300m and 250m long that go down to 150m. It provides work for 300 men and 90 women.
At all levels, it’s difficult work — and rudimentary. Men use mallets, hoes, shovels and hammers to extract gold; women rent home-made crushing machines.
"We made all that we use here," says Uyoma supervisor Joseph Odiambo. "This chain wire used to drop miners in and out of mines is the most important equipment for our operations. We use it as our lift, and it picks up one miner at a time."
The work does not pay particularly well — though Atieno has earned enough to put all of her children through high school and college.
It’s not easy, either. Women buy 25kg of rocks from the pits at $3 apiece. They then have to hire a crushing machine, for another $3 for each 25kg load. After sieving the gravel, they wash it in their basins, adding mercury to extract any gold particles. If they’re lucky, they’ll get two "points" — a point is one-tenth of a gram — from 25kg of rock.
"Brokers exploit us," says Atieno. "They buy from us at $5 per point and $50 for 1g of gold. The brokers sell the gold in Kisumu, Nairobi and Mombasa for more than 10 times our prices."
Still, it’s more than they would earn elsewhere. As another miner, Florence Anyango, says, Migori’s soil isn’t productive and high poverty levels have forced the men in some villages to abandon their families in search of jobs in the cities.
"This is semi-arid land and cassava is the only subsistence cash crop we have. Gold mining and fishing in Lake Victoria are the only sources of income," Anyango says. "Gold mining is more lucrative than fishing, and that is why we are here."
Not that there’s much to show for it. Most of the homes in the poor villages of Migori are built of mud, with corrugated-iron roofs. Illiteracy is high, as poverty forces children out of the education system. A 2018 World Bank report estimated Migori’s secondary school net enrolment rate to be just 37%; the primary rate is 80%. In 2016, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) found 32% of the county’s population was living on less than $1.90 a day.
Gold mining contributes just 0.8% of Kenya’s GDP, according to a 2018 research report by Martin Namasaka, Kenya communications co-ordinator for international development organisation Pact. In 2019, gold exports brought $14.1m into the fiscus, the KNBS says.
But artisanal mining — Kenya officially classifies and registers miners as artisanal, small-scale or large-scale — accounts for a fair number of jobs: 40,000 in the gold sector alone, and 30,000 in gemstone extraction, according to the Pact report. It notes that in 2015, as many as 800,000 Kenyans were dependent on the broader artisanal mining sector.
"In artisanal mining, men constitute 92% of the extractive workforce, while women constitute 62% of minerals processing — crushing, sieving and filtering," Namasaka writes.
In Taita-Taveta county, in southeastern Kenya, women join men in the mining pits, extracting gold and gemstones.
Mariam Hassan has been mining near the village of Mwatate in Taita-Taveta for 25 years — work that has allowed her to build a semi-permanent, mud-walled home for her family.
"I used to fear [working in the mines]," she says. "But other women encouraged me to keep it up. The only challenges are mines collapsing, and sometimes water floods the pits when our small pumps get overwhelmed."
It’s a common problem, as Uyoma group chair Jeremiah Ogoda tells the FM. That mine brings miners out of the shafts every three hours. "We do so for their safety, to pump water out of the tunnels," he says. "Sometimes we evacuate them before time, when water overflows the tunnels."
Women have advanced in [various] careers — some are pilots, others are generals in the military across the world. What is wrong with us being gold miners?
— Mary Atieno
Though artisanal miners are the primary gold producers in Kenya — there is only one known large-scale gold miner, the UK’s Acacia Mining — researcher Francis Wasike believes the output from the sector is not correctly accounted for. In 2017, the KNBS put output at 503kg, up from 197kg in 2016. But there’s limited data available on gold mining in the country.
"The government is not monitoring the operations of the artisanal miners, so most of the gold they produce leaves the country through the black market," Wasike says.
He says brokers take advantage of the porous borders to sneak gold out of the country. So most of the production in Migori and Homa Bay counties ends up in Tanzania, while gold produced in the areas of Kakamega, Kisumu, Siaya and Vihiga goes to Uganda.
According to Wasike, the ministry of petroleum & mining has no capacity to monitor mining activities properly, due to underfunding. (The ministry did not respond to requests for comment from the FM.)
Another issue plaguing the sector is a lack of land policy, says Wasike. "The law provides that all the land where minerals are discovered should revert to the state," he says. "But the state is not using its powers of compulsory acquisition of mineral lands through resettlement or compensation of the landowners."
It’s a point that’s picked up by Aaron Waswa, a geology lecturer at the University of Nairobi. "You will find that most parts [of Kenya], in areas where gold has been discovered, don’t have proper settlement plans. People have settlements on gold deposits, and this makes it very expensive for investors who want to venture into mining," says Waswa.
Thousands of Kenyans depend on laborious artisanal gold production as a livelihood, but little reliable data is available for the sector
— What it means:
It requires the payment of compensation, which may be higher than the potential of the mineral resource.
"It’s believed that minerals belong to the central government," says Waswa. "But the law also protects the landowners. We need organised settlement plans."
Far removed from the dealings of the government — and in the absence of such plans and investment — Kenya’s women miners continue going about their business. But in addition to the hardships they face at work each day, they are often discriminated against, too.
Having women work in mines is considered taboo in many Kenyan communities; outdated notions of gendered divisions of labour are prevalent, and women who defy these conventions are ill-treated.
"It is true that sometimes we are discriminated against and cursed by those who believe in traditions, but we will continue working in mines as long as we get our daily bread to feed our families," says Hassan.
"They call us all sorts of names, and sometimes we feel rejected, but nothing will scare or stop us from doing what we know best."
It’s a sentiment echoed by Atieno, in Migori county. "Those using outdated traditions to discriminate against us will be defeated," she says.
"Women have advanced in [various] careers — some are pilots, others are generals in the military across the world. What is wrong with us being gold miners?"
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