It’s not unknown for women to be murdered in mining villages. The dead body of 26-year-old Raiele Santos was found last year in the room where she had been living near the Cuiú-Cuiú gold mine, 11 hours’ drive from Itaituba.

The involvement of Indigenous people in illegal gold hunting, lured by the prospect of easy money due to record prices, has made Brazil's task of cracking down on wildcat mining in the Amazon far harder,

Jack, just give us a sense of how big a deal the gold mining sector and these small scale miners actually are. Why are they having such a big impact, outsized impact on the Ghanaian economy? So this is a big sector.

Dressed in a white singlet with a scarf tied around his head, Frank crouched near a muddy pit, preparing to plunge his hands into the soil in search of gold."The impact on our environment is devastating,

Ghana’s illegal gold mining boom has polluted waterways, destroyed farmland and cost the government billions in lost taxes amid allegations of political complicity.Eromo Egbejule reports for The Guardian.