Sierra Leone is a coastal nation on the Atlantic edge of West Africa, bordered by Guinea to the north and east and Liberia to the south-east. Its capital and largest city is Freetown, built around one of the world's largest natural harbours — historically the reason the city exists, and today the point through which lawful mineral exports clear.
The country covers roughly 71,740 square kilometres and is home to several million people across a tropical climate of forested highlands, river valleys and coastal plain. For the precious-minerals trade, that terrain matters: the river systems that drain the interior are exactly what concentrate alluvial gold and diamonds into workable deposits.
Sierra Leone's gold and diamonds are concentrated in a handful of districts across the centre and east of the country. Most production is alluvial — minerals washed out of their original rock and deposited in riverbeds and gravels, recovered by working those deposits rather than deep-shaft mining.
The Kono District in the east is the country's most famous diamond ground, the source of much of Sierra Leone's alluvial rough for decades. This is the region most associated with the Kimberley Process story.
Central Tonkolili is known for both gold and large iron-ore deposits. The gold worked here feeds into the licensed export chain alongside material from neighbouring districts.
Kenema in the south-east and Bo further west both yield diamonds and gold, completing a broad alluvial belt that runs across the interior. Our own material is drawn from this licensed belt, from Kono through to Tonkolili.
Sierra Leone is best known internationally for two exports that concern us directly: gold and rough diamonds. Both are drawn largely from alluvial deposits and both are governed by the same modern legal framework.
Because so much material is alluvial and worked across many small sites, the difference between a lawful purchase and a risky one is almost entirely about documentation and licensing — not geology. That is precisely what a clearance house exists to handle.
A short map of the bodies and law a lawful gold or diamond export passes through.