In June of 2019, Mwamba was invited to the UNEP Global Mercury Partnership and elected as a private sector advisor to planetGOLD, the UNEP’s flagship program for addressing mercury in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM).
Global Mercury Partnership
The Global Mercury Partnership has identified 8 partnership areas, or priorities for action, to address global anthropogenic mercury emissions. Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is the most emphasized partnership area, releasing more mercury to the environment each year than any other sector. Mwamba advises the ASGM Global Mercury Partnership Area through its advisory of the planetGOLD programme.
planetGOLD
The planetGOLD Programme’s mission is to make small-scale gold mining safer, cleaner, and more profitable in pursuit of a clean global supply of gold from small-scale miners. The program is working to eliminate mercury in small-scale gold mining by supporting improvements in these four areas: awareness raising, access to finance, formalization, and technical solutions.
The program is active in 9 countries, including Burkina Faso, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Indonesia, Kenya, Mongolia, Peru and the Philippines.
The UNEP invited Mwamba to advise the planetGOLD program after recognizing the innovative nature of Mwamba’s ore-marketplace and WAZI’s unique potential to scale the model globally.
WAZI is a supply chain and traceability solution designed to enable peer-to-peer processing in ASGM economies; eliminating mercury, increasing miner profits and steering the global ASGM gold supply into formalized markets.
