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Thandeka Matebesi, Business Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Miners Federation (ZMF) is at an advanced stage of formulating a comprehensive database of the country’s artisanal and small-scale miners, which will play a pivotal role towards formalisation of their activities.
ZMF secretary Mr Philemon Mokuele said compilation of the requisite information, which include the appropriate number of small-scale miners operating in the country was taking shape.
According to statistics from ZMF, more than 600 000 registered and non-registered small-scale and artisanal miners are involved in the extraction of various minerals with most of them being in gold production.
“We are almost through with the formulation of a small-scale miners’ database as we have managed to gather information from the southern parts of the country. We are looking forward to completing the process before 15 December,” said Mr Mokuele.
He said the small-scale miners’ representative body obtained most of the information from its affiliate associations.
“As a miners body, we feel that we should know the people we represent, where they are, how many they are and the challenges that they face. What is of importance to note is that as we work on the database we also ask at the specific challenges faced by miners in a specific area so that when we lobby the Government for assistance we know where the resources will be channelled,” said Mr Mokuele.
He, however, said logistic challenges were hindering the data collection process.
“The major challenge we are facing is that of transport for us to get to the districts and most of the places are in the rural areas so we sometimes struggle to get there,” Mr Mokuele.
Artisanal and small-scale mining provides a critical livelihood for thousands of people across the country. This class of miners also produces a significant portion of the country’s minerals, often enduring difficult and hazardous working conditions.
However, the true impact of their labour is relatively unknown due to limited and accessible data on the sector. This has an impact on the sector’s development, and often perpetuates a narrative that artisanal and small-scale mining is inherently bad for the environment and developing communities.
Mr Mokuele also said small-scale miners were faced with a myriad of challenges chief among them being failure to access flexible credit and finance packages from financial institutions.
“We have been negotiating with commercial banks such as MetBank to facilitate small-scale miners to access loans at reasonable interest rates so as to enable them to recapitalise their operations. As it is, most miners are failing to meet the collateral requirements of most of the banks,” he said.
derick.khumalo