Meet the Round 1 Semifinalists
Explore this page to learn about our 26 semifinalists in the 2019-2020 Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge.
A low-cost technological tool with which ASM miners will know in real-time the variables involved in the mining operation, occupational health and safety, and the environment, in addition to providing them with technical assistance and professional support at an affordable cost.
Provenance Proof provides an array of technologies - physical tracers and digital tracking systems - with the aim of bringing more transparency to every step in the gemstone industry’s value chain.
Waterhound’s cloud-based software applies machine learning and AI to eliminating waste water and reducing carbon emissions as sources of pollution of local freshwater resources, communities and ecosystems.
The ‘Gold+’ innovation shows the large financial losses of ASM to the owner (national society), to domestically drive and finance statutory optimization of the sector.
Community Health in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (CHASM) delivers scientifically rigorous, locally-driven environmental health response, safer-mining techniques, and remediation to vulnerable mining communities through partnerships with humanitarian organizations, miners, governments, and community leaders.
Minexx’s mission is to connect miners to the world. Minexx is a technology platform that uses digital payments, blockchain and IoT to ensure minerals are sourced responsibly and fairly for people and planet.
We intend to empower, and capacitate government and private sector partners, in West Africa - including groups of artisanal miners, to utilize UAV-based geo-magnetic survey, as a core tool for helping ASGM stakeholders map new gold prospects efficiently and safely, while vastly improving land management.
The Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) AI Management System is an automated web-based platform designed to assist governments and communities alike in addressing key social and environmental issues associated with ASGM by providing three independent and integrated systems.
Mercury free high-recovery scalable processing system for Artisanal Gold Mining that meets international standards and supports bright futures for miners and their communities.
This innovation enables poor, marginalised Dayak women gold panners in Kalimantan, Indonesia to self-organise, improve their productivity, and sell responsibly-mined gold at a premium price to jewellery-makers in Bali.
This project will build a low-cost way to detect mercury from artisanal mining in rivers that can be deployed over vast areas and that can automatically alert advocates with the GPS coordinates of where and when illegal mining is occurring so that remedial action can take place.
We harness immense amounts of satellite, drone, and ground data and use artificial intelligence to turn it into actionable information for policy makers and for the AI development community.
The elemental fingerprinting system provides internal physical tagging of the raw gold as close as possible to the source, complementing other tracing systems including blockchain and secure bags.
Conservation X Labs consulted with a number of organizations prior to the launch of the Grand Challenge. However, the Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge application and evaluation process was designed solely by Conservation X Labs.
Our policy was to allow representatives from our Global Coalition of partners to apply to the Grand Challenge. However, applicants from partner organizations could not also be the points of contact from the Global Coalition.
Decisions about the finalists are based on the evaluations provided by reviewers external to the Open Innovation team at Conservation X Labs. Reviewers declared any Conflicts of Interest ahead of and during the evaluation process, and they signed the Grand Challenge’s Conflict of Interest Policy.