A territorial approach allows us to better visualize our development in new countries.

As usual at the beginning of a new year, at ARM we reflect on our performance of the last year and commit ourselves to further improve our practices the coming year. This year an important objective will be to set up more efficient processes and determine more accurately if our activities generate positive impact at the local community level. We prepared ourselves for this throughout 2017 and are ready now.

2017 has been a challenging transition period for ARM, with large, multi-year projects ending and smaller and more diversified projects starting. This situation required us to reflect on our methods, organisation and management. 2018 emerges with several projects funded by a diversity of donors such as foundations, companies from the private downstream sector and bilateral cooperation with some of them prioritizing the same funding areas. Therefore, our work and organisation has been globally adapted to maintain a consistent set of activities at the territory level. By adopting such a focus, we intend to completely centre our vision on the territory, which is constructed together with the miners and the local communities and supported by strategies discussed with and adopted by other stakeholders. This approach allows us to be less dependent on project timeframes and to combine various sources of funding to optimise the impact on mining organisations and communities. It also strengthens our position with the miners and other local stakeholders, harmonising activities and reducing confusion.

A territory approach to our activities also allows us to better envision our development in new countries, like in Honduras where we started a project with the Macuelizo community, funded by the Lundin Foundation, or to diversify our activities in Africa, where we will expand our intervention in Burkina Faso. Peru and Colombia, where we have been working for many years, will be the labs where this new approach will be fully applied. Four new projects will be implemented in different areas of these countries, many of them with new mining environments and types of labour organisations. Our objective is to build a permanent presence in these territories, to support the mining communities on the long term and build a strong foundation for sustainable development.

As a corollary to this reorganisation and refocus, we will develop a very strong monitoring and evaluation system to be able to analyse the quality of our actions, readdress unadapted approaches, and, above all, improve the information flow between ourselves and the territories and other stakeholders and partners. In terms of governance, it will help us establish firmer foundations to facilitate dialogue on public policy at regional and national levels, relying more on local implementation of inclusive and participative governance programs.

We are looking forward to this exciting journey and hope that all our partners will come along to contribute to a sustainable transformation of the artisanal and small-scale mining sector!

Yves Bertran
Executive Director of the Alliance for Resonsible Mining