Two satellite surveys mapped across fourteen countries in the Congo Basin and West Africa.
The fourteen surveyed countries sit inside the outline of the whole continent, so the belt of activity reads against the rest of Africa. Each administrative area is shaded by how many mining footprints touch it. Click a shaded area to pin its numbers to the panel, or anywhere else in a surveyed country for that country’s total. Drag to pan, and zoom with the buttons or ctrl/⌘+scroll.
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Click a column heading to re-sort. “Areas touched” counts administrative units with at least one detection, against every unit that country contributes to the survey. An area is each country’s second or third administrative level, so what it is called locally varies — districts in Ghana, territories in DR Congo, chiefdoms in Sierra Leone, local government areas in Nigeria. The panel on the map tags whichever level applies, ADM2 or ADM3.
Every figure on this page comes out of these tables, so you can check any of it or take the analysis further.