Diamonds Do Good is the public-facing initiative and rebranded identity of the Diamond Empowerment Fund (DEF), a non-profit organisation founded in 2007 by Russell Simmons and a coalition of industry partners to channel diamond-sector resources into education and empowerment programmes in African producer nations. The rebrand to Diamonds Do Good — adopted in the mid-2010s — reflected a deliberate strategic shift: from a narrowly philanthropic model to a broader, evidence-based communications platform designed to articulate the aggregate socio-economic contribution of the natural diamond industry to the countries and communities in which it operates. In an era of intensifying scrutiny over supply-chain ethics and the rapid commercial ascent of laboratory-grown diamonds, the initiative represents the industry's most sustained attempt to place documented social benefit at the centre of its identity.

Origins and the DEF Mandate

The Diamond Empowerment Fund was established in the aftermath of the Blood Diamond film (2006) and the broader public debate it reignited over conflict diamonds. While the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme had already been in operation since 2003, providing a governmental framework to exclude rough diamonds financing rebel movements, the DEF addressed a different register of concern: not the dramatic worst-case scenario of conflict financing, but the quieter, structural question of whether diamond wealth was translating into meaningful improvement in the lives of ordinary people in producer countries.

The Fund's early work concentrated on scholarship programmes, particularly in Botswana, South Africa, and other sub-Saharan African nations. Grants were directed toward tertiary education for students from diamond-mining communities, on the premise that human capital development represented the most durable form of resource-sector benefit. This philanthropic model, while genuinely useful, was perceived within the industry as insufficient to counter the growing narrative — amplified by laboratory-grown diamond marketers — that natural diamond purchasing carried an inherent ethical cost.

The rebrand to Diamonds Do Good was therefore both a name change and a conceptual expansion. Rather than positioning the DEF as a corrective charity compensating for industry harms, the rebranded initiative sought to demonstrate that the natural diamond sector, taken as a whole and across its full economic footprint, generates substantial positive outcomes: employment, fiscal revenue, infrastructure, healthcare, conservation funding, and community development. The shift was from remediation to affirmative documentation.

The Core Argument: Diamond Economies in Producer Nations

The evidentiary foundation of Diamonds Do Good rests on the macro-economic realities of diamond-dependent states, most prominently Botswana, Namibia, and, to a lesser extent, South Africa, Angola, and Canada. These cases are not equivalent — their political economies, governance structures, and the terms on which diamond revenues are captured differ considerably — but together they constitute the industry's strongest material for the proposition that natural diamonds can and do generate broad-based development.

Botswana is the centrepiece of this argument, and with good reason. At independence in 1966, Botswana was among the poorest countries in the world, with a per-capita income of approximately US$70 and virtually no infrastructure. The discovery of the Orapa kimberlite pipe in 1967, followed by Jwaneng in 1972, transformed the country's fiscal position. The joint-venture structure of Debswana — a 50/50 partnership between the government of Botswana and De Beers — ensured that a substantial share of diamond revenues accrued to the state rather than being entirely expatriated. Diamond revenues have historically funded the majority of Botswana's government budget, financing universal primary education, a public healthcare system, road construction, and one of the most extensive antiretroviral treatment programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. Botswana's reclassification from least-developed to middle-income country status is routinely cited by economists as one of the more striking examples of resource-sector revenue being converted into human development, though scholars also note the challenges of diversification and the structural risks of commodity dependence.

Namibia presents a related case. Namdeb Diamond Corporation, jointly owned by the Namibian government and De Beers, operates both onshore alluvial mining and the extraordinary marine diamond operations off the Namibian coast. Diamond revenues contribute significantly to Namibia's GDP and government receipts. The marine mining operations, conducted by vessels such as the Mafuta and the Anna, are among the most technically sophisticated extractive operations in the world and represent a high-value, relatively low-footprint form of resource extraction. Namibia has also used diamond revenues to fund conservation initiatives, including support for community conservancies that protect wildlife corridors and provide income to rural communities — a dimension that Diamonds Do Good highlights as an example of the sector's contribution beyond direct employment.

Canada enters the narrative as a counterpoint to the Africa-centric framing: the Northwest Territories mines — Ekati, Diavik, and Gahcho Kué — are presented as models of environmental stewardship and Indigenous community benefit-sharing. Negotiated Impact Benefit Agreements (IBAs) with First Nations and Métis communities have provided employment, training, and financial transfers. The Canadian provenance has also become commercially significant, with some retailers and consumers willing to pay a premium for stones with documented Canadian origin, a dynamic that Diamonds Do Good has sought to extend to African-origin stones through provenance communication.

Employment, Livelihoods, and Artisanal Mining

Beyond the headline macro-economic figures, Diamonds Do Good draws attention to the employment dimension of the diamond sector. Large-scale mining operations — whether Debswana's Jwaneng mine, De Beers' Venetia mine in South Africa's Limpopo province, or Alrosa's operations in the Sakha Republic of Russia — employ tens of thousands of workers directly and support multiples of that number through supply chains and service industries. In communities adjacent to major mines, the economic multiplier effect of stable formal employment is substantial: wages support local commerce, school enrolment rates rise, and healthcare utilisation improves.

The artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector complicates this picture. An estimated one million people worldwide are estimated to be engaged in artisanal diamond mining, predominantly in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and Guinea. The conditions of ASM mining are highly variable: some operations are integrated into formal supply chains through initiatives such as the Maendeleo Diamond Standards, which Diamonds Do Good has supported, while others remain outside formal traceability systems. The initiative's engagement with ASM reflects an acknowledgement that the positive-impact case must address the full spectrum of the industry, not only its most technically sophisticated and governance-rich operations.

Conservation and Environmental Stewardship

A dimension of the Diamonds Do Good platform that has grown in prominence is the relationship between diamond mining and conservation. This argument operates on several levels. At the most direct level, large mining concessions — particularly in Botswana's Orapa area and in Namibia's restricted diamond zone — have functioned as de facto wildlife reserves, excluding agricultural encroachment and poaching from vast tracts of land. The Orapa Game Fence, enclosing the area around the Orapa mine, has been documented as supporting significant populations of wildlife including lions, leopards, and large herbivore herds.

At a more programmatic level, diamond companies and the DEF have funded conservation organisations and community conservancy models in southern Africa. The argument advanced is that diamond revenues, when properly directed, can underwrite the economic case for conservation in landscapes where wildlife and human communities compete for resources. This is a contested but not implausible claim, and it connects the diamond industry's positive-impact narrative to the broader discourse around conservation finance.

The Laboratory-Grown Diamond Context

It would be disingenuous to discuss Diamonds Do Good without acknowledging the competitive context in which it has intensified its communications. The rapid growth of the laboratory-grown diamond market from approximately 2015 onward, and the marketing strategies adopted by laboratory-grown producers — which frequently positioned their products as ethically superior to mined diamonds — created a direct reputational challenge for the natural diamond sector. Laboratory-grown diamond marketing often invoked, implicitly or explicitly, the spectre of conflict diamonds, environmental destruction, and exploitative labour practices, without necessarily engaging with the substantial evidence that the natural diamond sector, in its dominant contemporary form, operates under very different conditions.

Diamonds Do Good represents, in part, the natural diamond industry's response to this challenge. By aggregating and publicising documented evidence of positive socio-economic impact, the initiative seeks to reframe the ethical calculus: the choice between a natural and a laboratory-grown diamond is not, it argues, a choice between harm and harmlessness, but between two different sets of consequences, one of which — the natural diamond — carries with it a documented record of community development and economic transformation in some of the world's most economically marginalised regions.

This argument has been received with varying degrees of acceptance. Consumer research conducted by industry bodies has suggested that a meaningful proportion of diamond purchasers, when presented with documented impact information, assign positive value to natural diamond origin. Sceptics, including some development economists and NGOs, have noted that the positive cases — Botswana above all — are not universally replicable, and that the industry's record in more fragile governance environments is considerably more mixed. Diamonds Do Good does not claim otherwise; its communications have generally focused on documented positive cases rather than making universal claims.

Governance, Transparency, and Credibility

The credibility of any industry-funded positive-impact initiative depends substantially on the rigour of its evidence base and the independence of its verification. Diamonds Do Good has faced the inherent tension that it is funded by and aligned with the natural diamond industry, which creates an obvious potential for confirmation bias in the selection and presentation of case studies. The initiative has sought to address this by commissioning independent economic analyses, partnering with established development organisations, and presenting data sourced from governmental and intergovernmental bodies rather than exclusively from company reports.

The Kimberley Process, while a separate mechanism, provides a parallel governance framework that Diamonds Do Good references as evidence of the industry's commitment to systemic accountability. The KP's limitations — its narrow definition of conflict diamonds, its exclusion of human rights violations not directly connected to rebel financing — are well documented and have been acknowledged by reform advocates within the process itself. Diamonds Do Good does not rely solely on the KP as its ethical credential; rather, it presents a broader portfolio of evidence encompassing fiscal contribution, employment, and community investment.

Programmes and Partnerships

Among the specific programmes supported or highlighted by Diamonds Do Good and the DEF over the years:

• Scholarship and tertiary education grants for students from diamond-mining communities in Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and other producer nations.
• Support for the Maendeleo Diamond Standards, a framework developed to improve conditions and traceability in artisanal diamond mining in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Partnerships with conservation organisations operating in diamond-producing landscapes in southern Africa.
• Documentation and dissemination of economic impact studies examining the fiscal contribution of diamond revenues to national budgets in producer countries.
• Engagement with the jewellery retail sector to develop consumer-facing communications about natural diamond provenance and impact.

Critical Perspectives

A balanced encyclopaedia treatment requires acknowledgement of the criticisms directed at the Diamonds Do Good framework. Development economists have noted that the Botswana model, while genuinely impressive, reflects a specific combination of geological endowment, relatively stable governance, and historically favourable negotiating outcomes that is not easily transferable. In Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, diamond revenues have at various points been associated with conflict, opacity, and elite capture rather than broad-based development. The Central African Republic's diamond sector has been subject to KP suspension due to conflict financing concerns.

Environmental critics have questioned the ecological footprint of large-scale open-pit kimberlite mining, including land disturbance, water use, and the long-term management of tailings facilities, arguing that the conservation benefits cited by the industry do not fully offset these impacts. The industry's response — that rehabilitation programmes and conservation partnerships represent genuine mitigation — is not without merit, but the debate is ongoing and the evidence base is site-specific.

Finally, some observers have noted that the positive-impact narrative, however well-documented in its strongest cases, does not address the structural question of whether diamond-dependent economies are building sufficient diversification to sustain development beyond the finite life of their diamond deposits. Botswana's government has itself acknowledged this challenge and has invested substantially in economic diversification efforts, with mixed results to date.

Significance for the Gemmological Community

For gemmologists, jewellers, and informed consumers, Diamonds Do Good represents a significant development in the discourse around natural gemstone sourcing. The initiative has helped to shift the conversation from the binary of conflict versus non-conflict toward a more nuanced framework that asks what positive value a gemstone purchase generates, and for whom. This is a more demanding standard, but also a more honest one: it acknowledges that the ethical case for natural diamonds rests not on the absence of harm alone, but on the presence of documented benefit.

The broader implication for the gemstone trade extends beyond diamonds. The methodologies developed for documenting and communicating diamond-sector impact — economic multiplier analyses, community benefit assessments, conservation partnership models — are increasingly being applied to coloured gemstone supply chains in ruby, sapphire, emerald, and tanzanite, where the governance challenges are often more acute and the positive-impact documentation less developed. In this sense, Diamonds Do Good functions as a prototype for a wider industry reckoning with the question of what responsible sourcing means in practice, and how it can be credibly communicated to a sceptical and increasingly informed public.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Diamonds Do Good coverage
• American Gem Trade Association — responsible sourcing resources
• GIA — The Kimberley Process