"Solidaridad engages miners to promote responsible mining practices"

Solidaridad, an international civil society organisation is to educate over 200, 000 miners in Ghana, Tanzania and Cote d’lvoire by 2023 through its language barrier-bridging Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform. Mr Yaw Britwum Opoku, Gold Programme Manager at Solidaridad said it was to adopt best mining practices to improve on health, safety, environmental and business practices of small-scale miners. Mr Opoku in a statement said the platform was also aimed at up scaling the activities of the gold programme to reach a lot of miners nationwide and in some parts of Africa. Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) being largely an informal sector with limited access to information on responsible mining practices and sustainable production, operations in remote areas which makes deployment of interventions to improve the sector challenges...

He said they also met the Code of Risk mitigation for Artisanal and small-scale miners engaging in Formal Trade, which helped them to assess critical social and environmental risks, such as child labour, illicit trade, and uncontrolled use of chemicals and developed action plans to address them.“So far, Solidaridad’s gold programme has used the IVR platform to engage over 1,000 miners in Ghana,” he said. Mr Philip Baidoo, Health and safety manager, Beava Mining Enterprise, Nkatieso said “the IVR platform has helped in improving our work as miners.