De Beers director Jonathan Oppenheimer and Tanzania’s president Jakaya Kikwete today announced a $2 million project aimed at improving living conditions for diamond miners in the “informal” sector.

Diamonds from informal mining, which is often unregulated, are retrieved from streams and river beds where they occasionally wash up.

“The goal of the De Beers project is to provide these miners with access to fair-market pricing and healthcare,” the South African diamond giant said in a statement.

It said it was joining with the government of Tanzania and several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the hope of creating a workable model that can be used to help informal miners in other diamond producing countries like Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

De Beers has mining operations in Tanzania.