Each year, the GemFair team strengthens our field programming to attract and retain artisanal diamond miners. Some notable initiatives include:
- Receiving a suite of benefits when miners join the programme, including personal protective equipment, first aid kits and the provision of mentoring on our standards by GemFair field officers
- Providing fair financing to eligible participating artisanal miners, and
- Offering a fair price: when miners visit the GemFair diamond buying office, our expert buyers discuss step by step how we arrive at our valuation and resulting offer.
We check in with participating miners regularly through formal surveys captured using a digital data collection tool, as well as face-to-face conversations on how best we can meet their needs. This makes it possible for us to evolve our approach as required and creates a genuine feedback loop with participants.
Musa, a GemFair Trainer, delivers training at the mine site
New and enhanced assurance programme launched
In 2025, GemFair introduced a revised assurance programme to participating artisanal diamond miners. Some of the key changes included:
- Creating a more inclusive programme for more artisanal diamond miners, provided they meet our Core Requirements
- Removing the Aspirational Requirements section from the GemFair Standard and adding the relevant standards to our General Requirements, raising the bar on what we consider best practice artisanal and small-scale mining.
We had a successful roll-out of the updated assurance programme, taking our training and updates from the classroom to the mine sites. Activities included:
- Updating the training curriculum to reflect changes to the GemFair ASM Standard published at the beginning of this year
- Training of the trainers and launching a new and improved ASM standards course that outlines the changes in the ASM Assurance Programme
- Designing training materials to distribute at mine sites, including posters and operational checklists.
We tailored this training campaign to meet the needs and geographical proximity of participating miners. For those based at the mine site and unable to participate in a classroom setting, we brought the training to them so as not to interrupt their work, using posters with imagery and simple text.
In 2025, we delivered training to 16 mine sites and a total of 168 people.
Bringing training to the miners
Our management system
2025
499
7,500
181
14
442
1,102
128
2024
443
6,645
200
8
433
1,019
174
Delivering classroom training on GemFair standards
GemFair’s bespoke digital solution improves our field monitoring and diamond traceability capabilities
GemFair’s diamond logging and traceability technology was not developed as a one-off; we are constantly evolving our app and its related functionality based on the feedback of its key users – artisanal miners, our diamond buyers, and our field team – to ensure the diamonds in our supply chain are logged and traced securely and efficiently. In 2025, we carried out a ground-up rebuild of the coding of our technology so we can work within a more up-to-date framework.
Logging a diamond into the GemFair app
One new feature was to create a dashboard of participating artisanal mine sites to enable real-time updates of photos from mine site visits, diamonds offered to GemFair, and any outstanding corrective action plans for each miner. These data points are displayed in summary and help our field team plan site visits strategically and improve our overall audit trail.
Precision at the source: diamond scanning for traceability
This year we purchased new diamond scanning kit called RoughMatch™. RoughMatch™ was created by Spacecode Technologies. A portable plug-and-play device, RoughMatch™ helps us perform surface scans of the diamonds at our buying office, which can then be matched with a second machine in a separate location after we export them from Sierra Leone. This gives us a fast and reliable way to disaggregate parcels and verify the origin of each diamond. RoughMatch™ also enables easy identification of individual diamonds from our stock to meet the preferences of downstream customers. The equipment is lightweight—it is the size of a flight carry-on—so no special shipping requirements were needed to get it to our remote office location.
The end-to-end technology that we developed allows every single polished diamond to be registered onto Tracr with a specific ID that allows the diamond’s journey to be communicated with consumers. Tracr is a digital platform, developed by De Beers, that uses blockchain technology alongside advanced algorithms and 3D scanning to give each natural diamond registered on the platform a unique digital identity. As a diamond moves along the value chain, Tracr matches manufacturer scans back to its producer record, giving confidence in the diamond’s journey from rough to polished and enabling rich storytelling about its history and origin.
GemFair's Assurance Programme audit completed
An independent audit of the GemFair Assurance Programme was completed this year. We are pleased to note that the third-party auditor concluded that GemFair’s due diligence management system meets, and in many cases exceeds, the expectations of the OECD Due Diligence Guidance. You can read more about the audit here.
