Rupa gold mine

The Rupa Gold mine of Karamoja, Uganda is an artisanal (informal) mine located approximately 10 km north of Moroto Town in Uganda’s Karamoja region. After years of instability caused by inter-clan cattle raiding and a decade-long military disarmament campaign in Karamoja, many people in the region have been finding alternatives to their traditional semi-nomadic pastoralist lifestyles. One such alternative is mining. Typically male, miners use rudimentary tools to dig holes reaching up to 10 m underground. The miners then spend up to ten hours a day digging earth from tunnels. The earth is then passed to the surface in homemade containers where it is washed and sieved. Gold extracted at Rupa is bought on-site by dealers from other regions of Uganda and neighbouring Kenya. It is then transferred to either Uganda’s capital, Kampala, or Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, for resale. In early April 2011, the local price paid for 0.1 grams of gold was around 7000 Ugandan shillings, equivalent to around 2.5 US dollars. Generally, miners say that they extract between 0.05 and 0.1 grams (known locally as a “point”) each day. This local price level was barely half the price level on international commodity markets. In early April 2011, gold was trading at $1,476 per troy ounce, equivalent to $47.45 per gram, or $4.75 per point. The differential between the local and international price reflect

Mine data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).