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Anglo American diamond giant De Beers has announced the launch of an app to help small-scale, artisanal diamond miners in Sierra Leone certify that gems they work hard to get from the soil are legal.
The initiative is the latest attempt by the industry to clean up its image and shed the stigma of “blood diamonds” blamed for financing conflict, chaos and criminality in African countries, such as Sierra Leone and Liberia.
More widely, small-scale mining is often tainted by alleged links to insurgents or child labor, casting a cloud over supply chains for commodities such as cobalt, a key ingredient of lithium-ion batteries needed by electronics and electrified vehicles, and gold.
The De Beers’ pilot app project called Gemfair is a partnership with the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI), an NGO, and will target several small-scale mine sites in Sierra Leone in a meeting of high technology and pre-industrial mining methods.
Miners enrolled in the project must be licensed, adhere to certain environmental standards, work at places that are free of violence and meet other requirements.
The app is on a tablet and has a software application that shows the GPS location where the diamonds have been extracted, allowing for a record of the production process. The software can work online or offline in remote areas.
The miners in the West African nation are also provided with digital scales to weigh their diamonds and a tamper-proof bag where the gems can be deposited and then passed safely through the supply chain.
“The app we developed is to address some of the key challenges in logging and validating, to allow artisanal production to be traced from the mine site all the way through to export,” said Feriel Zerouki, DeBeers’ vice president for ethical initiatives.
According to DDI, up to 20 percent of global gem-quality diamond supplies are produced by artisanal miners, who typically wash gravel by hand in conditions that are often unhygienic and dangerous.
Artisanal miners panning for diamonds in the town of Koidu, Sierra Leone, April 21, 2012.
Blood diamonds, or war diamonds, refer to those sold for illegal purposes like funding insurgencies or civil wars.
The main initiative to keep such gems from reaching the market is a regulatory program called the Kimberley Process, which was given approval by the UN in March 2002. However, its focus is on conflict diamonds and does not directly address issues of poverty and exploitation.
(REUTERS)
