Double wins for PhD candidate Sulemana Saaka

June 2026 was a notable month in Sulemana’s academic path, as he both received an award and published an article. He first earned the Kari Polanyi-Levitt Graduate Student Paper Prize at the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID) conference at York University’s Glendon campus in Toronto. This annual award recognizes the best original graduate student essay in international development studies, and the winning manuscript is eligible for publication in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies after peer review.

Sulemana’s paper, from his dissertation “Whose Voices Count? Marginalized Groups and Participation in Community Benefit Agreements in Ghana,” explores the involvement of marginalized groups in Ghana’s CBAs. The results are concerning; instead of serving as decision-making platforms, CBAs often function as tools for exclusion and conflict management in the mining industry.

Sulemana also authored an article titled “Illegality by Design: Galamsey as a Structural Outcome of Neoliberal Mining Regimes in Ghana,” published in The Extractive Industries and Society. Utilizing a three-tiered operationalization of David Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession, the paper contends that illegal mining continues in Ghana primarily due to three principal factors rooted in the neoliberal restructuring of the mining sector during the 1980s.

First, agricultural lands previously occupied by farmers have been allocated to multinational corporations, limiting farmland and pushing locals into galamsey. Second, lands previously occupied by artisanal small-scale miners (ASM) alongside farmland have been repurposed for large-scale mining at the expense of local residents. Lastly, the reforms concentrate mineral wealth in the hands of the central government (state), leaving little for the development of mining communities.

Taken together, these processes have compelled Indigenous people in mining communities to resort to illegal mining as a strategic means of resistance and survival. The paper calls for robust mining reforms, including allocating a specific percentage of all mineral wealth to mining communities, renegotiating concessions to enable companies to release portions to ASM, and investing a set percentage of mining profits in local communities to promote development.

The full Open Access is available here.