Credit Access for Responsible Extraction (CARE)

Policy Context

The Credit Access for Responsible Extraction (CARE) project addresses exploitative lending practices that trap artisanal gold miners in cycles of poverty and informality. Currently, miners in Sierra Leone must borrow from informal lenders who use opaque, output-contingent repayment schemes that force miners to sell gold at steep discounts. The project partners with a local microfinance institution to offer conditional credit with transparent, fixed interest rates that allow miners to sell their gold at market prices and retain more profit from successful mining seasons. By making credit access contingent on formalization and safety standards, the intervention could create positive economic incentives for better mining practices while freeing miners from exploitative lending arrangements. This approach targets a sector employing approximately 400,000 people in Sierra Leone (and many more globally), offering a market-based solution to improve miners’ economic well-being and reduce externalities associated with mining in a setting where the state’s capacity to regulate artisanal mining is limited.

Study Design

Following field visits and partner meetings in Bo District and Freetown in May 2025, the project is now advancing to its scoping phase, co-funded by CEGA’s Development Economics Challenge, with data collection planned for Q3/Q4 2025. The team will use the funds to conduct research around Makeni, including constructing a sampling frame of artisanal gold miners, qualitative interviews and focus groups, and surveys across 65 mining sites covering approximately 130 miners and mine workers. This data collection will directly inform the design of the new lending program, focusing on miners’ demographics, socioeconomic status, access to finance, profitability, and interest in conditional credit products. The scoping work positions the team to develop a randomized controlled trial to rigorously evaluate the intervention’s impacts on economic well-being and mining practices.

Results and Policy Lessons

The project is currently in the scoping and data collection phase and does not yet report empirical impact results. Early field activities have generated important foundational insights that inform the feasibility and design of a future intervention. Preliminary site visits and engagement with artisanal gold miners indicate strong demand for alternatives to existing informal credit arrangements, which often involve high effective interest rates and restrictive purchasing conditions. Discussions with miners and local authorities suggest that access to more affordable credit could meaningfully affect miners’ economic decisions and their ability to comply with labor and environmental standards.

Administrative engagement has also yielded key progress. Collaboration with Sierra Leone’s National Minerals Agency has enabled access to licensing data and facilitated cooperation with local officials, supporting the construction of a comprehensive sampling frame across major mining districts. Initial qualitative interactions with miners, community leaders, and the microfinance partner indicate both operational feasibility and interest in a conditional credit product that links financing to responsible mining practices.

Full data collection, including surveys and interviews with mine operators and workers, is scheduled to begin in early 2026, with preliminary findings expected later that year. These forthcoming results will inform the design of a conditional credit intervention and determine whether a larger randomized evaluation is warranted. Together, the early insights suggest that the project is well positioned to generate policy-relevant evidence on financial inclusion and responsible extraction in the artisanal mining sector.