An open-source, citizen-facing platform that aggregates satellite deforestation alerts, water-quality data, and community incident reports on illegal artisanal gold mining ("galamsey") in Ghana.
Status: Phase 0 — bootstrapping. Production URL coming soon.
Galamsey has polluted more than 60% of Ghana's water bodies and degraded 44 of 288 forest reserves. Credible monitoring tools exist — galamStop, CERSGIS DIGITS, SERVIR-WA — but none are citizen-facing, methodology- transparent, or open-source. This platform fills that gap.
- Satellite alerts: GFW integrated alerts (RADD + GLAD) and our own Sentinel-1 SAR change detection (Forkuor et al. 2020 method)
- Water quality: Sentinel-2 NDTI turbidity index for the Pra, Birim, Ankobra, Tano, and Offin river basins
- Community reports: web form, Telegram bot, SMS, and USSD (Africa's Talking) with photo + GPS
- Incident timeline: news scraper across major Ghanaian outlets, structured extraction via Claude API
- Methodology: every layer has a published, peer-reviewed methodology page so journalists and researchers can replicate independently
| Layer | Choice |
|---|---|
| Web | Nuxt 3 + MapLibre GL + Tailwind CSS (Vercel) |
| API | FastAPI + GeoAlchemy2 + PostGIS (Cloud Run) |
| Database | Supabase Postgres + PostGIS + Auth |
| Vector tiles (static) | PMTiles on Cloudflare R2 |
| Vector tiles (dynamic) | Martin on Cloud Run |
| Raster tiles | TiTiler on Cloud Run |
| Object storage | Cloudflare R2 |
| SMS / USSD | Africa's Talking |
| Pipelines | Python via GitHub Actions cron |
- Node.js 20+, pnpm 9+
- Python 3.12+, uv
- Docker (for local Postgres+PostGIS)
- A Supabase project with PostGIS enabled
# Clone
git clone https://github.com/Phinart98/galamsey-tracker.git
cd galamsey-tracker
# Copy environment variables
cp .env.example .env.local
# Fill in your values in .env.local
# Web
cd apps/web
pnpm install
pnpm dev
# API (separate terminal)
cd apps/api
uv sync
uv run uvicorn main:app --reload- Code: AGPL-3.0 — see LICENSE
- Data: CC-BY-4.0 (derived alerts), ODbL (boundary data from OSM)
See CONTRIBUTING.md. All contributors must follow the Code of Conduct.
- Erastus Asare Donkor (JoyNews) — investigative galamsey journalist
- Ghana Coalition Against Galamsey (Dr. Ken Ashigbey)
- A Rocha Ghana (BRACE Project)
- WACAM, IMANI Africa, ACEP
Built on the shoulders of GFW, CERSGIS, SERVIR-WA, and the Forkuor et al. 2020 Sentinel-1 methodology. This platform extends, not replaces, their work by making it citizen-readable and open-source.