Assessing the impact of the Fairmined Certification on the well-being of the small-scale miners

In the last decade, there has been a growing trend in the adoption of certifications. The Fairmined certification is one, between only two, available to certificate responsible and fair practices of the artisanal and small scale mining. One of the reasons behind the growing trend in the adoption of these kind of certifications is that it as a way to improve the livelihood of the small producers or miners involved. Different authors estimate the effect of such certifications in the well-being of certified individuals; however, in the artisanal and small scale mining sector, I do not find any article that asses the effect of the Fairmined certification on the well-being of the certified miners. First, I propose a Fairmined well-being index following the well-being indices in the literature. My index considers 27 indicators classified in 6 dimensions. These components are not only material well-being but also mental and physical health, labor conditions and subjective well-being. Second, the information for the index is collected through 321 phone surveys to both, certified and non-certified miners in Colombia and Peru. The period of the data collection is from July to November 2020. Then, I find that on average, miners working on a certified mining organization, have a higher well-being level. That means, that miners working on a Fairmined certified mining organization are better-off, by about 4 percentage points, than those who are not part of a certified mining organization. Acknowledging that the results might suffer from selection bias, I re-estimate the effect using propensity score matching, finding that the results are consistent with the previous estimation. Finally, I also ratify the results when I zoom in the components. Fairmined miners are on average better off than non-certified miners in the components of health and safety, social connections and subjective well-being.