Diamond Pits Left by Sierra Leone's Mines Refilled Into 66 Hectares of Farmland in a Year

Decades of hand-dug diamond mining left thousands of abandoned, water-filled pits across eastern Sierra Leone. The Peace Diamonds Restoration Initiative, launched in May 2022 by the US non-profit RESOLVE, backfills and reshapes those pits into arable land for rice and other crops, with women and girls named as the main stewards of the restored plots. One early example was a flooded pit at Nyangida in Kono District that was filled in to make a rice field. RESOLVE's 2024 annual report says the initiative restored 66 hectares of abandoned mine sites in Sierra Leone that year, and its community-based approach includes village and chiefdom land committees to govern the land afterward.