Over the years our team has dedicated a lot of time and effort trying to sensitize around the risk of and raise the capacity of miners to responsibly use mercury. This booklet our attempts to contribute to managing, mitigating and potentially eliminating the use of mercury in this sector.

Currently, ASGM is largely financed by the informal economy with a finance-first mandate, which priorities commercial financial returns and has little or no regard for environmental, social or governance (ESG) considerations, including mercury reduction or elimination. To date, formal finance reaching the ASGM sector has generally been restricted to donor and grant finance, with minimal evidence of finance from commercial lenders, including from impact investors. This paper seeks to assist ASGM programs in accessing finance by better understanding the perspective of investors and the implications of ASGM’s status as a frontier investment sector, and has been written by the Impact Facility team, on behalf of the UN-financed GEF Gold project, set up to eradicate mercury and professionalize ASGM.

In this guide, we outline key mining equipment profiles, with the intention of helping mining investors and money lending institutions to understand what artisanal miners are seeking financial resources for, the machine profitability and their actual worth in the mining sector.