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Drawing on two decades of first-hand experience, Ebenezer Kwakye Agyemang offers the first full-length, comprehensive overview of small-scale illegal gold mining in Ghana in order to suggest new, better-informed ways of addressing the economic and social relations that sustain it.

As Agyemang shows, this sub-industry has grown into an existential threat to Ghana and other countries in West Africa, contributing to environmental degradation, public ill-health, and institutional corruption. Persistent failures to control it all share a core issue: namely, a lack of understanding of the value chain at its heart, which includes and affects a vast array of actors within and outside the country. In offering a fuller understanding of how this value chain works, Agyemang offers new ways of addressing it, including securitizing the sub-sector, banning certain machinery, and re-classifying it as organised criminal activity.

For its original, in-depth coverage and novel solutions, this book is a must-read for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers interested in sustainable development, risk and development, and environmental protection and research management in Africa.