Uganda: where poverty, child labour and exploitation reign

Buried in the earth in a rich seam carving its way from Lake Victoria in Uganda, lies the world's most prized metal, gold. But the fight to extract it is perilous and often deadly. Guy Kelly reports on conditions for the desperate workers who dig for it, and the people seeking a glimmer of hope

In the life of an artisanal gold miner, every day is a lottery, but no one ever seems to win.

The sun is high on just another Thursday in Tiira, a scattered village in Uganda’s south-eastern corner, 20 miles north of Lake Victoriaand within spitting distance of the Kenyan border. At the end of a potholed track snaking off from the parish’s main strip, quiet has fallen over Margaret Ikee’s mine.

It’s a hot, languid sort of afternoon. In the entrance to the mine, chickens and barefoot toddlers, roughly matched in number and not far off in size, scurry around on the blood-orange ground. Two tethered goats look on. Bar the odd rooster crow, the only noise is the scrape and thud of spade on earth. Scrape, thud. Scrape, thud.It’s dividing time. On a patch of land between a small shack and a huge opencast pit, 17 local men, women and children patiently encircle a man with a shovel. Each is carrying a primary-coloured plastic basin, waiting for the man to fill it. The clay ore will contain gold. Excruciatingly meagre amounts of gold – a ton holds no more than four or five grams – but gold none the less. It’s up to them to complete the unimaginably laborious, filthy and dangerous process required to extract the precious metal from their basinful, before middlemen arrive to rip them off, buying it at dubious prices in order to sell it on, often to Indians, at the market in Kampala. From there, via further trading and refineries, it’ll slowly make its way to us – ending up in our jewellery, mobile phones, engineering parts, money or even dental crowns.

This is a gold mine, but there are no glinting, booty-laden carts rumbling in and out of dark tunnels on rail tracks; no pith-helmeted prospectors barking orders. Instead, there’s an acre or two of scrappy land, a few huts – some made of brick, some of mud – and a very big hole that dozens of people rely on for survival.

The money is horrific, the conditions worse. Look hard enough as you cross rural Africa, Asia or Latin America, though, and you’ll find thousands of artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) sites like it. It’s an informal, often illegal industry that accounts for only about 10 per cent of the global gold supply (the rest comes from massive, legally recognised multinational mines), but it employs 90 per cent of the world’s gold miners, most of whom are forced in through poverty.