This chapter reflects critically on the challenges with formalizing artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – low-tech, labor-intensive mineral extraction and processing – in sub-Saharan Africa. Donor-led support for formalizing ASM activities in the region goes back five decades, a time when the path toward achieving this goal appeared rather straightforward. The sector, however, remains largely informal in all corners of the region due to a combination of exorbitant permit fees, bureaucratic regulatory and registration processes, and host governments’ growing preoccupation with large-scale resource extraction, which has reduced the number of available lands for prospective license holders considerably. In most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, momentum to formalize ASM – now recognized to be the region’s most important rural nonfarm income-earning activity – and to tackle these three aforementioned problems in particular has dissipated. This is due to host governments’ failure to acknowledge their complicity in fueling the sector’s informality through the implementation of inappropriate policy and legal frameworks, as well as once-powerful claims that ASM is a “poverty-driven activity” and provides a source of livelihood to tens of millions of rural families no longer resonating in ways they once did. The chapter targets ways in which to repackage the narrative for ASM formalization, with the explicit objective of rejuvenating policy dialogue on this subject in sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on the case of gold, a mineral widely extracted and processed on an artisanal and small scale in all corners of the region, it is argued that the key to reviving interest in formalizing the sector lies in repackaging the exercise in ways that speak to broader economic and social objectives, foremost the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).