Minera La Española S.A. Peru

Minera La Española S.A.
Peru
Location
The small-scale mining enterprise “Minera La Española S.A.” is located in
the village of La Españolita, Cháparra district, Caravelí Province in the
department of Arequipa. This mining settlement was founded by artisanal
miners in the inhospitable, desertic Cháparra area.
Organisation
The miners founded the
enterprise on June 2009 in
order to formalise their
economic activity, secure
their jobs and obtain health
insurance. The company is
comprised of 163 members:
138 men and 25 women.
The company employs 115
workers, while in the town
there is an association of
artisanal miners grouping
600 artisanal miners who
perform their labour in work
groups of around 10
members.
Directly, mining supports
around 800 people, some
250 families and indirectly it
contributes to the
livelihoods of around 700
families.
Production
The company extracts
around 340 tonnes of
mineral per month. The
work is being performed in
two shifts of eight hours
each.
The mine is hard rock type.
At the moment the
company doesn´t have its
own processing plant, they
sell the unprocessed ore
extracted from the mine.
However, the miners from
the association process the
ore in “quimbaletes”, a kind
of domestic plants already
used in the times of the
Incas. These huge grinding
stones are set in a rocking
movement by a person
standing on the top of them.

Achievements
The most important
achievement is the fact
that the miners decided to
get organised and chose
the way of formality.
It took time for them to
become convinced about
the convenience and
benefits of forming an
enterprise, and although
the process was not easy it
paid off: as a company the
artisanal miners were able
to secure a contract with
the title owner, which
ceded the rights to the
mining fronts which La
Española was exploiting.
Challenges
In order to be able to sell gold
directly the company needs to
install a cyanide leaching
processing plant. This process
must be accompanied by
health and safety training.
Administration is another field
that needs improvement:
formalisation of all the
contracts, finalising the
internal procedures and bylaws
and having them
approved by the authorities.
This process has to be
accompanied by training in
business management.
Finally, it is necessary to
support those miners who are
yet to become formal and to
assure a greater involvement
of women in the mining
community governance.
Our proposal
The gap analysis performed with La Española Company against the Fairtrade and Fairmined standards
indicates that the following areas need to be addressed in order to reach the certification:
Social: implementation of a more efficient internal control system and incorporation of the
gender approach in the management policies.
Economic: capacity development in business management and entrepreneurship, and
culmination of the company´s formalisation process.
Environmental: approving the environmental licences; training and investment in clean and
more profitable processing technologies.
Labour: training to improve the human resource management and the occupational H&S in the
mines; propelling the formalisation process of the miners from the village´s association.
ESTIMATED DURATION OF PROJECT 12 MONTHS