In rural Gwanda, Zimbabwe, illegal small-scale gold mining has devastated local farming communities already struggling with climate change-induced droughts. An estimated 400,000 illegal miners operate throughout Zimbabwe without permits, working primarily at night to evade police detection while systematically destroying farmland. The environmental impacts include deforestation, water pollution, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, creating a complex web of challenges for subsistence farmers. Specific community impacts are severe: farmers report waking to find their farmland completely dug up by miners, livestock deaths from falling into abandoned mine pits, and critical road infrastructure so damaged that transportation costs have tripled from R100 to R300 (US$5.43 to US$16.40). Women have been disproportionately affected, losing vital alternative income sources like harvesting mopane worms (with yields previously exceeding 30 buckets per season) due to deforestation by miners. Excluded from mining operations, these women are forced into peripheral roles such as washing miners' clothes, selling food, or sex work.