Altayeb Alhadi was 16 when he died on October 10 at a gold-mining site near Jabal Al-Aigdat, in Sudan’s Red Sea region. He was one of at least 72 miners killed there in an air strike attributed to the Egyptian military. He had been working at the site for only a few months.
The road that took him there began a decade earlier. As Al Jazeera recounts, his father died when a well collapsed in their village of Galli, in White Nile state, when Altayeb was six. Two months later his mother died too. That left five orphaned children, and Altayeb, the eldest, was the one expected to keep them alive. At 14 he travelled hundreds of kilometres north, to the region where the gold mines are, to earn enough to feed his brothers and sisters and keep them in school.
His family did not want him underground. “We warned him about the dangers, but he was ambitious,” his uncle, Alhadi Hamid, said. Relatives who had made the same trip worked in restaurants and other service jobs, and Altayeb started out in transport and odd work. Then he heard the stories miners tell about the ones who struck it rich, and he went to prospect in the nearby mountains.
On the morning he died, friends said, he drank tea with them at a restaurant near the site before going to the mine. A fellow miner, who was not named, said they had parted “less than 30 minutes” before the attack. “We suddenly heard a loud sound of bombardment, and we ran.” He described several strikes within minutes. When they found Altayeb, one hand and one leg had been blown off and he had a severe open wound to his abdomen. They carried him near a mountain for cover. “He died within hours.” Ten days earlier, his sister Rogaia Alhadi told local media, he had said he would be coming home soon.
The arithmetic of a gram
It helps to look at how the work actually paid, because the economics explain why a 14-year-old would take it. Altayeb dug with a group of about 15 young men and children, using basic tools and carrying ore to nearby mills to be processed. They worked day and night. Nobody earned a wage: pay depended on how much gold turned up and on whatever each person had agreed. “We used to dig for two to three weeks until we found a gram or less,” his colleague said. A gram sold for about $100, and the group shared it.
Here is a rough illustration, not a reported figure, since the individual deals varied. If $100 were split evenly among 15 people, each would get about $6.70. Spread over two to three weeks, that comes to somewhere between roughly 30 and 50 cents a day. And that is before costs. Earnings also depend on what the fuel and equipment cost and on the profit shares agreed with the financiers or equipment owners who back the digging, and some miners never earn back their expenses. Mohamed Awadalkarim, who mined in River Nile state for 10 years, said miners live in huts of burlap sacks and plastic sheeting and eat mostly lentils and sorghum porridge.
So the arrangement works roughly like this. The person with the money supplies the machines and the fuel and takes a share first. The diggers supply the labour and take all the physical risk, and are paid only if the ground produces gold. What keeps people signing up is the chance of a big find, and the success stories that reached Altayeb are how that chance gets advertised. It is a lottery, and most of the people buying tickets are poor.
A billion dollars, split a million ways
Across the country the totals are large. Citing Chatham House, Al Jazeera reports that artisanal and small-scale mining produced 53.71 tonnes of gold in 2024, about 83% of Sudan’s declared output, and that figure covers only areas the government controls. That implies declared production of roughly 65 tonnes. About one million people mine this way across Sudan’s 18 states, producing around $1bn a year. That works out to an average of about $1,000 per miner per year, before costs. The Ministry of Minerals says output reached 70 tons in 2025, despite the war.
Much of that gold never reaches the treasury. According to Sudan Tribune, central bank figures show official gold exports of 14.7 tonnes in 2025, worth $1.536 billion, and Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim said official exports did not exceed 20 tonnes. Take either number and most of the 70 tonnes went out some other way.
The war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in 2023, has wrecked Sudan’s economy and pushed thousands of people into mining, where shafts collapse, the ground gives way, air strikes come and medical care is scarce. Artisanal sites are generally seen as sitting outside the main networks that finance the war, but violence has reached them anyway. On June 16, attacks near the Egyptian border reportedly killed and injured several people.
Egypt accuses Sudanese miners of crossing the border near a concession run by an Egyptian company, and reportedly links some of them to smuggling gold, drugs and people. Al Jazeera found little independent evidence for those claims, and Sudan did not respond. The strikes have raised questions about the protection of civilians, sovereignty and accountability. Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan reportedly ordered a fact-finding committee of prosecutors, judicial representatives and security agencies. The findings of the inquiry into the June incident have still not been published.
Altayeb’s siblings now live with extended family, and people in Galli have started community efforts to remember him. He left home at 14 to keep four children in school. In a good stretch, his share of the work was a small fraction of a gram.