Amara Okonjo

Amara Okonjo covers artisanal and small-scale mining, a sector that produces a meaningful share of global supply and almost none of the paperwork. She reports from pits and processing sites rather than from ministry press rooms, and she is careful to write about miners as workers making rational decisions under constraint rather than as a problem to be solved.

Her central subject is formalisation: what licensing regimes actually do to the people they are aimed at, why mercury persists despite decades of programmes, and where the gold from these sites enters the formal chain.

She reports with local fixers who are credited by name whenever their safety allows it, and she does not publish identifying details of informal miners without consent.