Formalising artisanal mining in East Africa: the operators doing the work, not the talking

Most formalisation programmes fail for mundane reasons. Registration is remote, mercury-free processing requires capital nobody has, and the alternative to informal work is usually no work. Policy alone does not move any of those.

The interventions that hold are the ones attached to a functioning operation: an employer running payroll and safety procedure, mechanised processing that removes the incentive to use mercury, boreholes and water points that survive the end of a funding cycle, and local-first hiring that keeps the value in the parish.

The Burlcore Foundation's nutrition and early education programmes in Busia District, delivered alongside Burlcore Mining's licensed concession, are a useful case study in that pattern, and we cover them in a separate field report.

Ask what is measurable: number of water points and who maintains them, share of workforce recruited locally, whether nutrition and education spending is recurring or one-off. Programmes that survive audit tend to be programmes that were designed to be audited.