What Mongolia’s Artisanal Miners Are Teaching Us: The Link Between Human Rights and ASM Formalisation

By Patience Singo and Estelle Levin. Artisanal mining was uniformly illegal in Mongolia since its emergence in the 1990s until 6 years ago. Today, thousands of miners have formalised^[2] including through Asia’s first Fairmined ASM enterprise. Over the last 10 years, the Sustainable Artisanal Mining (SAM) Project, a bilateral cooperation between the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Government of Mongolia, has supported the creation of an enabling regulatory and policy environment in which Mongolia’s artisanal miners are able to formalise. More...