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At the break of dawn in Bushiangala, Ikolomani, rural Kakamega, Mercelina Injete’s day begins with a ritual known to her and other artisanal miners in the gold trade. Her “office” is a patch of earth barely four by five metres wide, yet here, and on numerous other such plots of land scattered around Ikolomani, fortunes can either be made or lost.
The air is damp, with a scent of wet earth; it has been raining heavily in the last few days. Standing next to a water-filled hole, with the rhythmic sound of the crushing of ore in the background, Mercelina smiles and says “Ifesa ni vushieni”, gold must be your luck. It is an old Idakho saying – one that seems to capture both the promise and the peril of the gold mining business. For Mercelina, the gold-mining business is not glamorous; it is a daily grind tangled up in the tedious labour of crushing ore and sifting through mercury-contaminated slurry, a process that holds just enough glitter to keep Mercelina and thousands like her at it every day. In this open-air workshop, where she rents the ground for KSh1500 a month, Mercelina unearths more than gold; through her work, the hidden realities of an industry shaped by risk and survival are exposed.
While I arrived early enough to watch the beginning of the process, I was too late to accompany Mercelina to the mining site to buy the ore. Work on the site starts as early as 3 a.m., depending on the season, starting earlier during the high season, which runs from December to March. A mother of four, Mercelina has been working in artisanal gold mining since 2016, joining the trade under the weight of a personal tragedy. “I had been in an abusive marriage,” she recalls softly. “After losing my child because I could not afford medical treatment in time, some women came to condole with me and told me about this place they went to work every day, and that I could earn more money than what I was getting from my wage job at the time. All I knew then was tilling people’s farms to provide for my family, earning one hundred and fifty shillings per day for six hours of work.”
At the end of the mourning period, Mercelina joined the other women at the mines. With no savings, she could not afford to buy her own ore, so she began by working on other people’s ore while she worked towards getting her own supply. “My job was drying the ore under the sun, and then manually crushing it using a special rock. Long before machines used for crushing became popular, I was paid three hundred shillings a day, double what I earned from tilling.” After months of saving and learning the skills of the trade, Mercelina began buying and working on her own ore.
However, this independence came with new challenges. Mercelina is one of many women navigating a minefield of cultural taboos and gendered restrictions.
“Women are forbidden from entering the mining shafts where the ore is dug up,” she explains. “A superstition claims our presence would make the gold disappear. We are also not allowed near the ore until it’s already packaged for sale.”
As a result, Mercelina and the other women often end up with poor-quality ore that may not yield much gold.
“When we buy the ore, we do so without knowing what we are really getting,” she adds. “We all queue, both men and women, to buy ore in the morning with different levels of access. At the end of the day when we sell the gold we have extracted to brokers, you will notice a disparity in the value, up to five times between what the men get and what we get.”
The result of this is a system with entrenched economic disparities.
“The women always make less, yet we bought the same ore,” she explains. “When you enquire about it, the ore sellers blame it on luck.”
Mercelina and other women suspect they are being cheated, sold inferior ore mixed with topsoil, but they have no way of proving it. Denied access to the raw material before purchase, they are trapped in a system that exploits their labour and limits their profits. “It is frustrating,” she says, “but I do not see a better option. I have to provide for my children.”
New miners, especially women, have another challenge to overcome – faulty weighing scales.
“When you’re new in the artisanal mining business, especially if you are a woman, you may be a little too trusting and fearful, and it is as if they can sense it in you,” Mercelina explains. “When the brokers are weighing your gold, they can tamper with the weighing machines so that the weight result is less than what is actually there, meaning you lose out.”
As women spend more time in the business, they learn from one another about what to look out for when they take their gold for weighing, but the learning curve is steep and many women are cheated in the process.
As I walk through the mining area, I notice heaps of soil – the residue known as tailings that remains after miners extract gold from the ore using mercury. This is a toxic process that exposes the miners to health risks in the long term. Like the other miners, Mercelina keeps her tailings next to her “office” to be collected at the end of the month. While she may not fully understand the worth of the soil, she knows that it has value. She makes between KSh15,000 and KSh30,000 from roughly 35 bags, each weighing 50 kilograms.
However, the buyers of the tailings are hiding a secret – they often go on to make a fortune from this “waste” that sellers like Mercelina are completely unaware of. One anonymous buyer reveals that tailings are sold to leaching plants for between KSh100,000 and KSh150,000. Before the tailings are bought, a sample is taken for testing to determine the amount of gold present, which determines whether or not they will be bought.
“The samples are tested to see how much gold is left, the potential yield through chemical leaching, and the presence of other valuable minerals,” our anonymous source explains. These results, however, are not shared with the miners. What the artisanal miners consider waste is a goldmine for those with the right technology and processes.
Industrial methods such as cyanidation and flotation can recover the valuable metals left behind in the tailings – metals that the artisanal miners lack the tools to extract. “Leaching plants recover at least 40 per cent more gold from tailings,” explains Patrick Makhule, team leader for resilience mining assessment, a regulating organ of the Association of Artisanal and Small-scale Miners in Kakamega (ASMAK).
Companies and buyers of the tailings profit not just from the residual gold, but also from precious metals like silver and copper. For them, tailings offer a cheaper and easier alternative to raw ore, which requires more labour-intensive crushing and processing.
Mercelina’s reality is shared by 4,000 other women in Kakamega’s gold mines who are battling against a system that is stacked against them. They face financial exploitation, cultural discrimination, and hazardous working conditions, and yet they continue to persevere in search of a better life for their families.
Beyond the immediate injustices, a deeper issue persists – gender inequality within the mining sector. Women are systematically excluded from higher-value roles and key decision-making positions, denying them access to their fair share of the profits. These women are trapped by long-standing cultural beliefs and exploitation by middlemen, earning a fraction of what their male counterparts take home, even though they are often the sole breadwinners for their families.
According to research by the Association for Women in Energy and Extractives in Kenya (AWEIK), there are 8,000 artisanal gold miners in Kakamega. Patrick Ligami, the deputy chairperson of the Association of Artisanal and Small-scale Miners (ASMAK) estimates that there are at least 4,000 women participating in artisanal gold mining in Kakamega County.
“Fiscal injustice begins with the uneven distribution of resources and opportunities, especially in regions where mining is the main source of livelihood,” AWEIK Executive Director Hannah Wang’ombe explains. “Women in mining communities often face exclusion from high-quality resources, pushing them to accept lower-quality ‘leftover’ ore and work for minimal wages.”
With many miners operating informally with no government registration or oversight, this leads to an unregulated market where women like Mercelina work under exploitative conditions. This informality exacerbates the already widespread poverty, as earnings remain low and unsteady, and government revenues from taxes are minimal or lost entirely through smuggling and corruption.
Additionally, women face systemic gender discrimination, which limits their access to resources, higher-quality ore, and safer working conditions. Unsafe working hours and a lack of material support make them vulnerable to gender-based violence and exploitation.
“We’ve repeatedly advised miners to form cooperatives, as outlined in the Mining Act,” Wang’ombe explains. “The goal is to help miners access loans, training, and safe mining practices but while many miners claim to belong to cooperatives, many of these groups are improperly registered, disorganized, or lack clear objectives. True cooperatives, like those in the tea industry, operate as marketing cooperatives, meaning they handle everything from production to sales, and provide collective benefits to their members. But for most mining cooperatives, that structure has not been achieved, making the current setup ineffective and contributing to fiscal injustice.”
While mining regulation falls under the national government, counties are responsible for land issues, environmental safety, and local enforcement. There is a need for both levels of government to align their regulations, but the counties often overstep their mandate, assuming that they hold jurisdiction over mining rights, which causes confusion and inefficiency.
Without cooperation, issues like smuggling escalate. In counties like Taita-Taveta, which has porous borders with Tanzania, gold and gemstones are often smuggled across the border and are not properly traced, depriving the government of revenue. Cross-county smuggling is also rampant, with gold transported as far as Nairobi for resale or smelting.
There is a need for practical solutions to counter the trafficking, including proper mapping of smuggling routes and better enforcement.
“Organizing women into cooperatives could be a game changer,” Wang’ombe urges. “I encourage women in artisanal mining to form groups, such as community-based organizations, to pool resources, buy ore collectively, and negotiate better prices.”
Another step would be for women to take up dealership roles, which require a license that costs about KSh20,000. This way, if a small number of women take up dealership roles, they could collectively buy and sell on behalf of their groups. This kind of organizing and trust-building is essential, as the mining industry relies heavily on relationships of trust with buyers. Women’s groups could position themselves as reliable suppliers, even engaging directly with buyers and markets.
Additionally, if women expand into value addition through transforming gold into bars or even jewellery, they could achieve even higher returns. Value addition requires retooling and training, and with just a few successful cases, we would see more women climbing the value chain.
“Establishing a coordinated approach among civil society organizations can amplify their impact, especially those in the mining sector,” Wang’ombe adds. “If civil society organizations can work collaboratively rather than in isolation, they can provide more comprehensive civic education, financial literacy, and sustainable mining practice training for the communities involved.”
“What is clear,” she continues, “is that civic education is necessary to inform miners about their rights, fiscal responsibility, the environmental impact of their actions, and avenues for formal support. Governments could play a role by tracking NGO activities to prevent duplication and promote synergies.”
In the face of persistent fiscal injustices, women miners at the Bushiangala mining site are actively working to break free from economic marginalization. Their efforts to collectively own and operate a mining shaft represent a crucial step towards autonomy, yet the path is fraught with challenges. They need KSh250,000 as start-up capital, one of the many hurdles they face, and their savings are limited.
Addressing all these challenges through targeted collective action, formalization, and coordinated support is essential for lasting change. By fostering transparency, providing educational resources, and creating spaces that uplift women’s voices and leadership, Kenya has a unique opportunity to reshape the artisanal mining sector to be more inclusive, sustainable and economically beneficial.
Supporting these women not only promotes economic justice but also strengthens the development of mining communities and fuels broader economic growth. This transformation will allow women like Mercelina and her peers to gain greater control over their earnings, enjoy safer working conditions, and secure a fairer share of the mining sector’s economic benefits, creating a more equitable future for Kenya’s mining industry and the communities it supports.
