The 2017 mass eviction of tens of thousands of artisanal miners from Uganda's Mubende gold fields remains one of the defining community-impact episodes in the country's recent mining history. Years on, follow-up reporting and human-rights documentation continue to describe displaced households struggling to re-establish livelihoods, with limited transparent compensation and unresolved questions about how licensed concessions were subsequently allocated.
Why this is still a live sustainability issue
Formalisation is the stated direction of travel for Uganda's gold sector, and it is the right one. But formalisation carried out primarily through eviction rather than through licensed cooperative pathways damages the very communities the sector's sustainability narratives claim to serve. Any credible responsible-sourcing framework covering Ugandan gold has to be able to answer where Mubende-displaced miners are today and how the current licence holders are engaging with them.
What good practice would look like
Operators taking on ground previously worked by artisanal miners should be publishing verifiable community-transition plans: negotiated resettlement, cooperative on-ramps, or documented local employment. In the absence of those, GoldLockTreasury treats Mubende-legacy concessions as carrying elevated social-licence risk irrespective of their formal title.
