What a recent scientific publication by Duke University, ESPOL, and the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) reveals about how to support subsistence women miners in Ecuador in their transition toward mercury-free recovery technologies and better living conditions.
Women jancheras selecting gold-bearing ore from mine waste in Camilo Ponce Enríquez, Ecuador. Photo: Dayron Monroy.
On the steep slopes of the Camilo Ponce Enríquez canton, in Ecuador’s Azuay province, gold is the undisputed engine of the local economy. There, in the shadow of mining companies, thousands of women known locally as jancheras (discarded-rock collectors) make their living. Their work consists of gathering the discarded rock — the janche — that mines companies throw away because they consider its gold concentration too low to justify processing at a processing plant.
Hammer in hand, these women patiently crush the rock and, in most cases, use mercury to extract the tiny gold particles they manage to recover. Jancheras work where the mine ends and oblivion begins. With no contracts, no protective equipment, and no recognition from mining authorities of this grueling labor, these women are exposed to countless risks. Mercury settles into the nervous system, travels downstream with the water, and reaches hands and tables that have nothing to do with the precious metal. The invisibility is administrative, but the harm is real — and it spreads across the entire population.
Against this backdrop, a recent scientific article published in the journal Environment and Development Economics by Duke University, ESPOL, and the Alliance for Responsible Mining poses a fundamental question: What would happen if these women could sell their ore directly to beneficiation plants that do not use mercury? Could this technological alternative both improve artisanal miners’ incomes and, at the same time, eliminate the use of this toxic substance?
Janchera carefully selecting, one by one, the rocks that still contain traces of gold. Photo: Dayron Monroy.
Who are the Jancheras?
To understand why these women miners continue to depend on mercury to recover gold, we first must understand who they are. Between September and December 2022, I lived in Camilo Ponce Enríquez and spoke face-to-face with 236 jancheras. Guided by them, I visited waste dumps, tailings deposits, and the small mercury-amalgamation mills known locally as chanchas. Behind every sack of rock carried down the mountain
was a different story, but also patterns that repeated over and over. The data reveals a group of women working in highly vulnerable conditions, with very few economic alternatives outside of subsistence mining.
Janchera preparing a chancha for amalgamation, a rudimentary technology that remains
the only viable option for processing her ore. Photo: Dayron Monroy.
Nine out of ten women doing janche work are women. Many started this activity at a young age and faced limited educational opportunities. On average, they have just 7.5 years of formal education, meaning most did not complete secondary school.
For many, janche is not a choice among various employment options; it is one of the few available opportunities to generate income in a mining territory
where the highest-paying jobs are typically concentrated among men and workers with higher levels of education.
Behind each woman, on average, are two to three economically dependent people. Children, grandchildren, and older relatives depend on an income that, in most cases, falls below the Ecuadorian minimum wage of USD $425 at the time of the surveys collection. At first glance, the work seems collective. Group leaders talk to mining companies to gain access to their waste dumps and coordinate work shifts. But the cooperation usually ends there. When it is time to sort the ore, process it, and sell the gold, each woman works on her own. Only one in ten jancheras physically pools her ore with other women. Most carefully separate what they recover and return home with just a few kilos of rock. These are volumes too small to access processing plants, so they end up being processed in the amalgamation chanchas that abound in the area. The result is a poverty trap: although processing plants have technologies capable of recovering more gold without using mercury, most jancheras work with volumes too small to access them.
From the outside, the solution to this problem seems simple. If a single janchera cannot gather enough ore
to sell to a processing plant, it would suffice for several to associate and sell it together. But this weak
associativity cannot be explained simply as a lack of organization and cooperation. Behind it lie problems
of trust, liquidity, and infrastructure that the jancheras themselves can hardly resolve.
The first obstacle lies in the ore itself. Two sacks may weigh the same, yet contain very different amounts
of gold. Without metallurgical tests that are affordable for small volumes, no one can know with certainty
how much gold each woman contributes to a shared batch of ore. And when contributions cannot be
measured, there is no reliable way to ensure that the distribution of profits will be perceived as fair.
The second obstacle is liquidity. The benefits of working together do not appear gradually. They materialize only once the group has accumulated the minimum tonnage required by a processing plant. Until then, each janchera must wait, trusting that the others will recover ore at a similar pace so that the material can be
sold quickly and converted into cash. Finally, there is the most tangible obstacle of all: where to store the ore while waiting to reach that minimum volume. Most women do not have access to secure warehouses or
suitable storage facilities where they can keep the fruits of their labor for days or weeks. Every sack represents value, and often the contributions of several women. Without the physical infrastructure needed to store and safeguard the material, the risk of theft, loss, or disputes becomes significant. As a result, at the end of each workday, most jancheras take their sacks of ore back home.
If Processing Plants Recover More Gold Without Mercury, Why Do So Many Jancheras Keep Processing Their Ore in the Amalgamation Chanchas?
To find the answer, we presented the jancheras with a series of decisions closely resembling those they face in real life. We showed each woman hypothetical ore-purchase offers. Some promised better prices. Others offered to handle transport. Some paid immediately; others required waiting several days. Less visible aspects also varied, such as the requirement to issue an electronic invoice or the availability of an independent metallurgical test. For each card, jancheras answered a simple question: “Which of these processing plants would you sell your ore to?” A third alternative was always available: refuse both offers and continue processing the ore themselves in the chanchas of Camilo Ponce Enríquez.
Behind these everyday answers lies valuable information about individual preferences. By analyzing thousands of decisions from the 236 participants, the team could reconstruct what really tips the balance Jancheras gathered for a community feedback session to discuss and validate the study findings. when a janchera decides whether or not to sell to a processing plant. In other words, we identified which conditions generate interest, which build trust, and which barriers ultimately tilt the scale in favor of continuing to use mercury.
What Would a Processing Plant Have to Offer to Compete with the Amalgamation Chanchas?
The results revealed a much more complex story than is usually assumed. It is not that women ignore that
technology could bring them better benefits.
The jancheras’ decisions are shaped by a combination of economic incentives, family needs, costs, distrust, and administrative burden. To understand the relative importance of each of these factors, we translated their preferences into a monetary measure known as Willingness to Accept (WTA). This measure allows us to estimate how much an offer would have to improve to compensate for an unfavorable condition, or how much value women assign to features that give them more security and trust.
Thanks to this, it was possible to put a figure on questions that normally seem impossible to answer: How valuable is immediate payment for a janchera? How heavy is the burden of paying for transport? How big is the barrier of requiring an electronic invoice? The answers, in the next figure, help explain why, even when a technological alternative is provided by processing plants, many women still opt for mercury.
Beyond Price
The results revealed something that, at first glance, seems obvious: no one dislikes receiving a better price for their gold. But the experiment also uncovered something less apparent. For jancheras, price is only part of the story. Many of the women we spoke with spend hours walking through mine waste dumps, carrying sacks of ore from the mountains down to the urban areas where the chanchas are located. In that context, logistics matter almost as much as money. When an offer stated that the processing plant would organize and cover the cost of transportation, its attractiveness increased significantly. The perceived benefit was equivalent to receiving an additional USD 9.04 for every gram of gold sold. The other highly valued condition was access to an independent metallurgical test. For the average janchera, having an impartial assessment of the ore’s gold content generated a welfare gain equivalent to receiving an additional USD 13.62 per gram of gold. In a business where the product is a rock whose value cannot be seen with the naked eye, trust becomes an asset almost as valuable as the metal itself.
The Hidden Cost of Selling Formally
Among the study’s most striking findings was the critical importance of liquidity. For many jancheras, the income earned today pays for tomorrow’s food, their children’s school supplies, and other essential household needs. When an offer proposed delaying payment by one or two weeks, its attractiveness dropped sharply. To compensate for this loss in perceived welfare, the processing plant would have to offer the equivalent of an additional USD 11.22 per gram of gold sold. Yet no condition proved as problematic as the requirement to issue an electronic invoice. Forms, registrations, legal requirements, what is routine paperwork for a company often means time without income, additional travel, and interaction with institutions that have historically failed to recognize these women and their work. The study confirms this with numbers. The mere requirement to issue an electronic invoice reduces the attractiveness of an offer by an amount equivalent to USD 18.63 per gram of gold. There is also a contradiction that the system has largely overlooked: the very women who stand to benefit from formalization are often the same women who risk losing social assistance benefits if they become formalized. This is a challenge that no mining formalization policy has yet managed to resolve.
Conclusion
As we analyzed the results, an uncomfortable conclusion began to emerge. In different forums on eliminating mercury in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining, a seemingly reasonable premise is often heard: if beneficiation plants recover more gold without mercury, artisanal miners should prefer to sell their ore to obtain higher income and pollute less. However, our findings tell a more complex story. The average janchera in the study prefers NOT to sell her ore under the current conditions offered by processing plants in Portovelo (southern Ecuador), even when faced with marginal price increases. When bureaucratic, logistical, and financial barriers are added up, the only viable alternative is to keep processing on one’s own. Although having an independent metallurgical test builds trust and significantly raises an offer’s appeal, that benefit is not enough to compensate for the combined effect of requiring electronic invoicing, delaying payment, and transporting the ore far from the urban center of Camilo Ponce Enríquez.
Taken together, these conditions reduce perceived welfare by an amount equivalent to USD 31 for every
gram of gold sold. Put differently, for the average janchera to accept an offer with these characteristics, the
processing plant would need to compensate her with an additional payment of roughly USD 31 per gram
above the market value (at 2022 prices).
The lesson is clear. The problem is not that jancheras resist change, ignore the harmful effects of mercury,
or fail to recognize that processing plants recover more gold than traditional amalgamation methods. More
than 90% of the women we interviewed acknowledged that mercury is harmful to both human health and
the environment. Likewise, nine out of ten said they would be willing to change their processing methods
if doing so guaranteed higher incomes to support their families, and seven out of ten expressed a
willingness to sell their ore directly to a processing plant.
The challenge is that the conditions required to access processing plants are often misaligned with the
organizational and economic realities of jancheras. What may appear to outsiders as an irrational decision is,
in fact, a perfectly rational response to the constraints these subsistence miners face every day.
For processing plants to become a genuine, attractive, and mercury-free alternative for jancheras, a
coordinated effort is needed. Behind every gram of gold recovered from mine waste lies a story of
resilience, one that deserves access to clean technologies and fair market conditions.
At the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM), we are actively working to build these bridges. We invite
organizations, investors, and strategic partners to connect with us and explore opportunities for
investment, collaboration, and joint action to help transform the future of artisanal and small-scale mining
To learn more, we invite you to read the full article published in Environment and Development
Economics:
Can large-scale technology raise small-miner income and reduce mercury? Prospects for female
waste-rock collectors selling ore to non-mercury processing plants. 2026; 31(2-3):210-235.
Authors: Danny Tobin, Alex Pfaff, Dayron Monroy, Bryan Salgado, Adam Kiefer y Daniel Garces.