Sociodemographic attributes and dependency on artisanal and small-scale gold mining: The case of rural Gorontalo, Indonesia
Field location.
The objective of this research is to investigate the livelihoods of villagers of rural Gorontalo, where limited job opportunities and poor infrastructure impede improvements in rural settlements. The research focused on rural regions where small-scale gold mining (ASGM) activities are prevalent in the economy. Given the associated complexities of the livelihoods of the villagers, the paper pays particular attention to household income and its sources and then examines associations with key socioeconomic variables, focusing especially on the contribution of educational development. The questionnaire survey was conducted among households in five villages of rural Gorontalo in August 2017, and 310 effective samples were collected. The results indicate that more affluent households receive a higher proportion of income from formal public sectors, such as government institutions. The source of income from mining accounts for approximately 20%, which is almost constant across the income quartiles. Fractional logit models were employed to examine the dependency of household income on mining. The estimation results indicate that educated households depend less on mining income than do uneducated households. Households with young household heads receive less income from mining than do those with old household heads. The paper implies that low educational attainments are related to a higher dependency on mining, probably due to limited job opportunities in the formal sector. Therefore, improvements in educational attainment are associated with a reduced dependency on the mining sector. The results yield key information for formulating policies for remote villages where a substantial improvement in rural livelihoods is pivotal to reduce dependency in the context of poor ASGM regions.
Komatsu, S., Tanaka, K., Sakakibara, M., Arifin, Y. I., Pateda, S. M., & Manyoe, I. N. (2020, November). Sociodemographic attributes and dependency on artisanal and small-scale gold mining: The case of rural Gorontalo, Indonesia. In IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (Vol. 589, No. 1, p. 012020). IOP Publishing.