Breaking Ground on Inequality: Small-Scale Mining’s Reach and Impact

＂Breaking Ground on Inequality: Small-Scale Mining’s Reach and Impact＂ explores how small-scale mining intersects with global socioeconomic disparities, impacting contemporary inequality. Persistent disparities exist locally and globally (UN: age, gender, race, ethnicity, migrant status, disability). Oxfam Ghana highlights inequality’s disruptive impact. The paper uses a political economy framework to analyze politics/economics in small-scale mining: government policies, power dynamics, market structures, and resource distribution. It uses qualitative methodology, interviews (academics, officials, miners in Ghana), and content analysis to examine how small-scale mining aggravates disparities (resource distribution, opportunities, socioeconomic landscape) and urges academia/policymakers to address these issues. It aims to enrich post-COVID-19 sustainable development discourse, contributing to more equitable systems by foregrounding small-scale mining and inequality.