The Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development Project II (PRADD II) mobilized a Land Administration Specialist (LAS) during the period March 18 – April 3, 2014 to carry out an assessment of the mining cadastre system and propose solutions for administering artisanal mining areas.
PRADD II’s assessment overlapped with a similar, yet more detailed and far reaching, assessment being carried by an international mining and cadastre expert under the World Bank Projet d’Appui à la Gouvernance du Secteur Minier (PAGSEM) project. To avoid duplication of effort, since PAGSEM has agreed to share the consultant’s report, PRADD’s assessment was realigned to focus more on possible areas of assistance where PRADD II could help improve the administration of artisanal mining operating licenses, artisanal mining production data, support for USGS in the collection of geological and geomorphological data, spatially based data collection for M&E purposes, and conceptualization of project activities connected with strengthening the protection of surface tenure rights in areas where ASM is being carried out.
This report first looks at critical observations coming from this consultancy with an emphasis on key issues affecting the ASM sector, such as the poor coordination with the Centre de promotion et de développement minier (CPDM), inappropriate approaches to records management, and constraints associated with the government approach to parceling (known as parcellisation in French) of ASM zones. It then goes on to propose activities and approaches for overcoming these constraints, while raising the profile of other topics such as the formalization of customary surface tenure rights in ASM zones.