Since the independence, many African countries are yet to implement a system that can effectively address the gender disparities within the extractive sector, whether it is within the corporate governance structures or the actual employment within that sector. This reform is long overdue, but it is important if institutional foundations for male and female participation in the extractive sector are to be achieved. There is no way there will be proclaimed success in gender equity and improvements in governance, economic and social developments in most communities that rely on extractivism as a source of life.
Gender dimensions in the extractive sector can be traced with the history of mining in Africa. The importance of mining in Southern Africa is quite significant because the sector has contributed to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), foreign exchange earnings, and employment within the southern part of the continent. According to SADC report in 2000, mining contributes about 60 percent of total foreign exchange earnings, 10 percent of total GDP (though in some member states it goes up to 50 percent), and about five percent of direct formal employment. The region is also an important player on the international minerals market, with between 11 percent and 45 percent of the world supply of eight major commodities, namely, gold, platinum, diamonds, copper, uranium, cobalt, manganese, and chromite. South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Angola, Zimbabwe and Zambia are known to have vast mineral resources.
Until 2007, when China emerged in the gold industry, South Africa was the world’s largest gold producer. South Africa supplies about 80 percent of the world’s platinum. The mining industry is also South Africa’s biggest employer, with around 460, 000 employees, and another 400, 000 employed by the suppliers of goods and services to the industry. Botswana, DRC and Namibia have large diamond resources. Zimbabwe also has a rich mineral resource base, which includes gold, platinum, asbestos, platinum group metals (PGM), and recently-discovered diamonds in the Chiadzwa area. Zambia’s economy has been sustained by the copper industry for many years. Despite such rich resource endowments, it is ironic that these countries still have a high prevalence of poverty and inequality, even in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, which the United Nations classify in the Medium Human Development (MHD) category of countries
Gender activists are of the opinion that with regard to women, the mining sector is an injustice. The disagreement is that the majority of women in the region are largely excluded or marginalised from participating in or benefiting from the vast mineral wealth of the region. They are at the periphery of the industry. One writer Hanyona further buttress this point by asserting that women have incomplete access to mineral wealth in terms of ownership or equity participation and they are marginalised in terms of governance and management of the industry, as reflected in the tiny minority of women who are on the boards of directors of mining companies and in senior management and supervisory positions. In terms of employment, women establish a very small proportion of the sector total. Although it should be approved that, to some extent, women have benefited from the corporate social accountability expenditure of mining companies, the evidence seems to suggest that these benefits are limited.
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The discrimination of women in the extractive sector can be traced back to the development of the mining industry during the colonial era. The migrant labour system in most of the mineral-rich countries employed males and introduced laws that prohibited husbands and wives from living together at the mines as evidenced by the notorious hostel system in South Africa. Women lived in rural areas and worked on the land. David and Wyk (2009) have argued that the separation of families was a deliberate strategy by the colonialists to keep mine wages low. Women essentially subsidized mining companies unknowingly. Thus, women were actually exploited through the use of their unpaid labour in agriculture to subsidise mining operations. Even when the migrant labour system was dismantled with the attainment of political independence, allowing women to join their spouses on the mines, few were able to get jobs there. Therefore, foreign colonial policies of discrimination against women, coupled with destructive cultural and patriarchal attitudes towards them, and the failure by most African governments to correct the colonial policy after independence has to make it difficult for women to make economic strides in the extractive sector in numbers that are notable.
Theresa Moyo argued that the underlying causes of inequality within the extractive sector can be explained by the historical imbalances in terms of women’s access to education, predominantly in science and engineering fields, Moyo claims that throughout the region, women are under-represented in institutions of higher learning (colleges and universities) and fewer women are enrolled in technical and science disciplines. This means that women are not prepared for some of the more technical positions within the mines. Until recently with the beginning of this decade, legal systems impeded the employment of women on an equal basis. The Zambian example shortly before that time, the law did not allow women to work underground except by virtue of an exemption, which could be granted upon application.
At the centre of extractive industry is the issue of women empowerment. However, the idea of women’s economic empowerment is not uncontested. By illustration, the World Bank is of the view that women’s economic empowerment can be achieved by improving their ‘competiveness’ in the market, whilst the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) maintains that women’s economic empowerment must be achieved through women’s “equal access to and control over critical economic resources and opportunities, and the elimination of structural gender inequalities in the labour market including a better sharing of unpaid care work”. The position that women’s economic empowerment cannot be achieved without addressing structural inequalities in resource access and control, and the fair distribution of paid and unpaid work is the starting point for the correction of the gender disparities within extractive sector.
In respect of extractives, women’s economic empowerment presents itself in two ways: firstly, the erosion of actually existing livelihoods or economic activities by extractives through displacements, loss of land and natural resources, and the pollution of water supplies, and secondly, the potential for women to invest in industrial mining for profit-making or to obtain employment in extractives companies and the businesses that support them in upstream or downstream economic activities. Women’s employment as workers in industrial mines and as artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM) may, depending on circumstances and conditions of work, be considered a form of economic empowerment.
Women world over as workers in mines suffers some forms of abuse. An opinion piece in the Guardian in 2012, the article recounts the stories of women workers in South Africa, India, the United States, and Australia and their experiences of sexual harassment, unequal wages, and poor working conditions of a gender-specific nature in the mines. The article further explores women’s formal legal inclusion in the mining sector in Australia and post-apartheid South Africa arguing that without significant transformation of the work culture and environment, women’s incorporation is generally not a liberating experience.
As this article has shown that it is important to look beyond women’s wage labour to address women’s reproductive work, which is incorporated into their roles and work duties on the mines, and subsidizes for the poor wages and living conditions of male miners something the extractive sector need not to overlook. Planning by the responsible authorities should revolve around the impact of mining on women’s unpaid care, which is a largely invisible question in the analysis of resource extraction and its societal consequences. Unpaid care describes work, often domestic or care-oriented, performed mostly by women in the home, which despite its great social and economic value is not recognized, counted, remunerated or valued.
Tapuwa O’bren Nhachi is a Programs Coordinator with the Institute for Sustainability Africa (INSAF) an independent think tank and research institute on sustainability and sustainable development based in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted at [email protected] / [email protected] twitter @onhachi
