Ghana: TWN Blames Scale Mining Menace On Weakling Economy

Third World Network-Africa (TWN), an Accra-based a research and advocacy non-governmental organisation (NGO), has blamed the recent gangsterism and other challenges in the artisanal and small scale mining (ASM) in Ghana on a weakling economy. The NGO argued that if the Ghanaian and African economies were creating enough jobs, no citizen of African would have engaged in illegal scale small mining, knowing the dangers involved. The Executive Director of Third World Network-Africa, Dr. Yao Graham, expressed these views at the opening of a two-day capacity building workshop for West African civil society organisations on regional and continental mining reforms, held in Accra. The workshop, which was attended by 40 representatives of major constituencies from across West African, were drawn from civil society organisations, labour unions, women organisations, the media and other stakeholders on the continental Africa Mining Vision (AMV), and the related ECOWAS Minerals Development Policy (EMDP) Organised by Third World Network Africa, with support from the Open Society Initiative for West African (OSIWA), the workshop

was designed to expand and deepen participants' understanding of the AMV and EMDP's objectives and their implications; support engagement with ECOWAS to harmonise the goals of the AMV and the EMDP, and the envisioned harmonised regional code; and lastly, to strengthen collaboration and networking among a diversified range of non-state actors and organisations for advocacy on the AMV and EMDP. According to him, mining had emerged as a leading economic activity in West Africa. Ghana, Mali, and now, Burkina Faso, are today three of Africa's most important gold producers. continued