Supporting Artisanal Gold Mining Actors to Comply with planetGOLD Criteria

The planetGOLD program is a global program working across 27 countries to eliminate mercury from artisanal and small-scale gold mining and to support more responsible supply chains. The program has developed the planetGOLD Criteria to govern the operations of artisanal gold mining actors engaged in their projects to meet environmental and social safeguards. The Criteria includes the CRAFT Code, as well as additional indicators specific to planetGOLD.

While each individual project reports on the planetGOLD Criteria, the program does not impose a universal approach to data collection, and project teams are largely leading this process. The planetGOLD team piloted Bloom by IMPACT as a potential tool for artisanal gold mining actors to be more independent with data collection and reporting. The planetGOLD program was looking to support artisanal mining actors to be able to collect their own data and easily identify if they were or weren’t complying with the criteria. Using Bloom by IMPACT would allow them to quickly identify risks, design progressive improvement plans, and communicate all of these things to funders and prospective buyers.

In 2024-2025, the planetGOLD program, in collaboration with the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM), worked with Bloom by IMPACT to support three artisanal gold mining cooperatives in Ecuador in their supply chain conformance with the planetGOLD Criteria. The application had to be easily accessible to gold miners and cooperatives working in remote communities, often with poor internet connectivity.

The Bloom by IMPACT team adapted the CRAFT Code and planetGOLD Criteria into a custom Framework, with indicators and scores allowing artisanal mining actors to quickly visualize pass/fail status and progress. Bloom automatically generated the questionnaires, which were integrated with Kobo Toolbox. These questionnaires were accessed by the leaders of the mining cooperatives, collecting data on their mobile devices through the Kobo Toolbox app.

As data was collected by the artisanal mining cooperatives, users in Bloom—including planetGOLD, ARM, and the cooperatives themselves—viewed summaries of the data collected in easy to read, visual reports, through an integration with Tableau. By itself, Kobo Toolbox—or other similar data collection tools—allows for a low-cost, mobile-based data collection but produces only raw data that must be manually structured and analyzed, which can be time consuming and is also challenging for non-experts. Bloom by IMPACT structures the data in advance and automates the analysis, allowing for immediate and clear benchmarking, progress and impact monitoring, and visualization and reporting. This allows the user to understand what the data says with a quick glance including overall conformity, time-sensitive risks, and areas for improvement.

Bloom by IMPACT helped the participating cooperatives easily see where changes needed to be made to conform to the planetGOLD Criteria. Places for immediate action could be immediately flagged as they are colour coded—with green, yellow, and red—aligning with the Criteria themselves. Not only does this offer project managers important insight into active supply chains, but it allows local actors the ability to more effectively engage with the international market.

Feedback from the artisanal mining actors and project participants about Bloom has been further used to improve the application. Bloom by IMPACT is continuing to support the planetGOLD program with its projects in Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire.