AfricaFiles
Title: A Fair Stake in the Ground
Author: Jill Filipovic
Category: Gender
Date: 4/21/2014
Source: Foreign Policy
Source Website: http://www.foreignpolicy.com
African Charter Article# 15: Everyone shall have the right to work under satisfactory conditions, receiving equal pay for equal work.
Summary & Comment: Many women work as miners or , more likely, servicing miners' needs. Eiher way, poverty is their lot. this article explains why keeping women away from Congo's mines - which are rife with exploitation and sexual violence - could do more harm than good. Beside the fact that it would be completely impossible. JK
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/04/21/a_fair_stake_in_the_ground_women_mines_congo_drc
BUKAVU, Democratic Republic of Congo - Bembeleza Mungo Akonkwa, 41,
cradles her infant son and hunches slightly. "I have so much back pain,"
she says, sitting in the backroom of a hotel restaurant in Congo's South
Kivu province. "I have pain in my uterus. So much pain. I'm unable to
walk or to carry big things."
It's worse when she menstruates; her periods last for two weeks and
leave her barely able to stand. There's no money for a doctor.
"I don't know what's wrong," she says. "It just hurts."
Akonkwa's old job, hauling minerals and supplies up and down the hills
of the Marok mine in the eastern Congo, left her physically debilitated.
The pain also means she can no longer easily work. That's a big problem:
With 11 children and no husband (he ran away), the $2 a day she earned
from carrying 100 lbs. packs kept her family afloat. The infant, she
says, is almost two - but he's so malnourished and small that he looks
like he's closer to nine months old.
A few years ago, Akonkwa had a particularly unproductive day hauling
supplies, and she was on her way home when a miner spotted her and
offered her $2 for sex. Unsure of how she was going to feed her children
that night, she agreed.
"And that's where I got pregnant with this child I have in front of me,"
she says.
Akonkwa is one of hundreds of thousands of women who work in and around
Congo's mines, sometimes extracting minerals directly but more often
cleaning, hauling, panning, and processing materials or engaging in
secondary economic activities like cooking or selling food to miners,
almost always under tremendously exploitative conditions. These same
mines have helped sustain eastern Congo's 20-year-long conflict -
they're a source of political power and economic support for whoever
controls them. For smaller-scale artisanal mines, that control is
usually asserted by one of the many militia groups (even though large,
multinational corporations technically own the title to many of them)
who operate with impunity.
Although violence against and exploitation of civilians is rife in
Congo's conflict - most notoriously, the rape of women - it is
particularly atrocious around mining sites. In addition to being treated
as packhorses, women who need access to the mining sites to sell food or
other goods have to negotiate permission from site owners, who routinely
demand sex as part of the cost of entry. Men who work in and around the
mines also frequently rape women and girls. Child marriage, which is
uncommon throughout most of Congo, happens with regularity in mining areas.
If you talk to Washington policymakers or Congo's increasing number of
celebrity advocates, the solution to the endemic violence that women
like Akonkwa face is regulation of conflict minerals, including gold and
the "3Ts" (tin, tantalum, and tungsten) that are used in consumer
electronics like laptops and smartphones. Groups such as the Enough
Project, a human rights organization focused on Sudan and Congo,
emphasize that non-transparent mineral supply chains in Congo mean that
"American consumers have no way to ensure that their purchases are not
financing armed groups that regularly commit atrocities, including mass
rape." They push for corporate due diligence. "There is good news," the
Enough Project's Raise Hope for Congo website states. "Because we as
electronics consumers are tied so directly to the problem, we can
actually play a role in ending the violence."
That message has also reached Congress. The Dodd-Frank Act, passed in
2010, requires any company that does business in the United States or
trades on its stock exchanges to disclose the origins of the conflict
minerals they use; if the company sources those minerals from Congo, it
has to submit an annual due diligence report to the Securities and
Exchange Commission.
There's no question that the Congolese mineral trade abets sexual
violence and other human rights violations, and that the Congolese
people would greatly benefit from regulation and transparency of mining
(as well justice for survivors of rape and other crimes). But the
political narrative about women and mines is a narrow and sometimes
manipulative one: Stories of abuse draw attention to a pressing problem,
but there is little subsequent discussion of how to empower women as
economic and political actors in the development of Congo's mining sector.
"Some advocacy groups have largely used the sexual violence phenomena as
a hook to bring people into the larger conflict mineral issue," says
Joanne Lebert, director of the Great Lakes Program for Partnership for
Africa Canada. "They're drawing on emotive responses to something
absolutely horrific, but there is little follow through. Everything
having to do with gender outside of sexual violence is just dropped."
If there is follow-through, at a local level, it is often guided by
long-standing and limited assumptions about the sort of work women
should be doing. "I think that the fight should be to enable or to
empower women in what they are able to do," says Justin Kabanga, the
national coordinator of Congo's Centre d'Assistance Médico-Psychosociale
("Center for Medical-Psychosocial Assistance," or CAMPS) who also works
closely with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Women would be better
off doing the traditional female labor of small-scale farming, he says,
so his organization focuses on helping women to leave the mines by
purchasing and cultivating farmland.
"The idea that women should be out of the mine sites is a widespread and
widely supported view in the DRC," Lebert explains.
Ensuring that gender issues aren't so divorced from discussions about
how to improve Congo's mines is critical.
These mines will continue to be drivers of the country's economy, even
after conflict, and Congolese women deserve a fair stake in their
country's future.
These mines will continue to be drivers of the country's economy, even
after conflict, and Congolese women deserve a fair stake in their
country's future.
* * *
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that Congo has
some $26 trillion worth of untapped mineral resources, with some of the
world's greatest reserves of gold, diamonds, copper - and the
aforementioned 3Ts. Very little of the economic benefits currently
culled from the mines trickles down to the Congolese population, 80
percent of whom live on less than $2 per day; most of it goes to
militias, international corporations, and the government in Kinshasa.
The country remains one of the five poorest in the world, and women in
particular bear the brunt of Congo's poverty.
International regulations, including provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act
and the OECD's Due Diligence Guidance, attempt to clean up mineral
supply chains and pressure demand-side companies into purchasing
minerals through transparent processes. These regulations are important
initial steps toward stability and violence reduction; cleaning up
supply chains will certainly help to curtail bribery and some forms of
labor exploitation. But this is only one piece of the puzzle. For mining
reform to be truly beneficial for the Congolese population, gender
dynamics in mining communities must be addressed - dynamics that many
lawmakers and other international actors do not understand well.
Women make up 30 to 50 percent of the mining sector's work force,
concentrated in lower-status roles: illegal trading, carrying minerals
downhill for washing, dragging tools and goods for miners' use, panning
for gold, sex work, laundering clothes, and selling food. In some cases,
women aren't even allowed to take on even these exhausting roles:
Donatien Nakalonge, a community leader from Walungu, South Kivu, says
that some local leaders have banned women from mining sites entirely
because of superstitions about women bringing bad luck and concerns
about distracting a mostly male work force. (He agreed that women are
better off on traditional farms.) The government has also limited
women's access to mines. "In response to the great attention about
sexual violence, Congo passed a law stating that no pregnant women could
be in the mines at all, and no women could be in the mines after a
certain hour," Lebert says. "The local interpretation of that has often
been that there should be no women in the mine site. Some artisanal
claim holders now have rules."
Some women, however, do participate in extractive work alongside men,
and they appear to fare better than women banned from mines. When
Lebert's organization conducted a gender analysis of one artisanal gold
mine where the claim-holder barred women from the site and compared it
to another where women were engaged in the extraction of artisanal gold,
they found that the women living around the exclusionary mine were more
vulnerable than the group of women actually working in the other mine.
The women who were excluded had to depend on their male partners for
access to cash. And in order to perform secondary economic activities,
like cooking or selling goods, they had to get special permission from
the claim holders - which could include sexual favors. Other women
banned from mining sites have to negotiate with the Congolese military
or militia groups for access.
"It amplified their vulnerabilities," Lebert says. "They didn't have
access to cash, and they had to negotiate their way into certain areas
in order to have access to any form of entrepreneurship."
Unfortunately, the international actors engaged in development work,
advocacy, and legal reform around mining and minerals in Congo do not
always grasp these realities. When asked whether international actors
are identifying economic opportunities for women, empowering women
financially, or bringing women to the table in efforts to clean up the
supply chain, Lebert says "the answer would be no, no and no."
"There are opportunities for a meaningful inclusion of gender with the
multiple audits being carried out, with the formation of monitoring
committees, and with other governance tools in development," Lebert
added. "Women should be enabled to participate more fully. And men, too,
should be able to bring a gender lens to governance work."
Doing that requires evaluating women's roles and building their capacity
to work safely in a sector with enormous growth potential. Practically,
that means targeting women for education and training programs so that,
for example, they could gain the skills to work as auditors along a
supply chain, which, thanks to Dodd-Frank, is already seeing an enormous
demand for trained inspectors. Auditors could also be taught to flag
exploitation and to promote integration of women into various parts of
the supply chain. Better access to credit would allow women to start
small businesses outside of the mines. And women working in and around
mines could (and should) also be party to conversations around how to
make the mines more humane places.
Of course, a push for gender equality also means focusing on providing
more basic necessities, from education to family planning. It also means
bringing in gender specialists at various levels of development and
across sectors to influence policies. More broadly, too, it requires a
shift of perspective: Advocates and decision-makers from Washington to
Kinshasa often see men as the economic actors in mining, and women as
victims of violence, in particular rape. That has to change, to reflect
the real nuances of what is happening on the ground.
"There may be well intentioned programs, laws, and policies, but none of
it is being evaluated, certainly not from a gender perspective," Lebert
says. "Their impacts are unclear, and they are often based on anecdotal
and incorrect information.... We need to really be able to understand
the gender and power dynamics and where women are in the supply chain
and what renders them vulnerable and what creates opportunities."
"It's valuable to draw attention to the pervasive and horrific
exploitation of women in the Great Lakes region," Lebert added. "But
what we risk doing is not actually understanding that this is a larger
issue of insecurity - pervasive, systematic insecurity."
Minerals, of course, are not the only potential source of wealth in
Congo. Another is land, and farming in Congo is traditionally women's
work. But the problem with insisting that women "stay on the farm" -
beyond the troubling assumptions about gender roles - is that there are
reasons that many women are forced or seek to decamp to mines in the
first place.
Some are displaced by war and crisis (as are Congolese men). Others are
abandoned by their husbands and ostracized in their communities after
being raped, requiring them to leave their family farms. What's more,
farmers mostly exist at a subsistence level, eking out just enough to
survive - not make a serious profit. Making the move to farming as a
business involves many obstacles: For instance, grain farmers are
unlikely to have consistent electricity, so there is no way to run a
mill regularly. That means their grains are sent across the border to be
milled, then imported back into the country and sold at a higher price.
But even if electricity were available, women would need credit to buy
the seeds and tools that would allow them to grow enough crops to mill
and sell. And here, once again, gender biases come into play.
"There's a lot that can be done in terms of livelihoods and areas where
women are already strong and already working, but where they have
absolutely no support," says Adrienne Stork, a project advisor working
with the UNEP's Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch. "But
nothing ever gets off the ground in terms of people being able to
improve the way they work and what they do, and improving opportunities
to market what they produce."
In other words, ensuring Congolese women's economic futures means better
understanding and developing sectors like farming, where women have
traditionally worked, while also accounting for women's interests in the
country's lucrative mines.
* * *
Bembeleza Mungo Akonkwa says she would like to start a small business
selling petrol. But to do that, she needs start-up capital or credit she
does not have and cannot easily get. These days, she barely has enough
money to get by day to day.
She tries to stay away from the mines, yet sometimes, when there is no
food left, she drags herself back to Marok to carry packs up and down
the mountain again. She gave up on trying to send her children to school
a long time ago; she can't afford the fees. Now, she is focused purely
on survival.
"I don't see a future for my children," she says. "Thinking about it
gives me so much pain. I try not to, but I think about it all night."
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the AfricaFiles' editors and network members. They are included in our material as a reflection of a diversity of views and a variety of issues. Material written specifically for AfricaFiles may be edited for length, clarity or inaccuracies.
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