I am thrilled to be joining GAIA to support its members in defining their environmental justice agenda on batteries, a new area of focus for the organization.

The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) is a global network of grassroots and national organizations from 92 countries around the world who are working together on waste and justice. I will be coordinating and ensuring cross-regional research alignment and strategy definition by GAIA members on electric vehicle battery waste, and supporting donor engagement.

This work with GAIA complements my existing work since 2018 with The 11th Hour Project, the grant-making arm of The Schmidt Family Foundation. In that role, I advise The 11th Hour Project’s human rights program on implementing its strategy in Guinea on asserting the human rights of communities impacted by industrial mining, as well as in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on access to energy and impacts of the world’s largest proposed hydropower dam project, Grand Inga. 

My work now fittingly spans the full life cycle of addressing the human rights and environmental justice questions on materials to realize a just transition and climate justice: from the devastation wreaked on local communities by extraction of iron ore and bauxite in Guinea, to the unchecked production of toxic batteries with premature obsolescence that will make up the next wave of waste to be dumped in the global South, to the false promise of mega-hydro to deliver access to energy for all in DRC.

The post Joining GAIA to lead their new Batteries work first appeared on Communities First.

Forced Relocation of Community Through Violence, Intimidation, and Exclusion at AngloGold Ashanti’s Mine in Kintinian, Guinea

Conakry, January 31, 2017 – South African gold-mining giant AngloGold Ashanti acquired land to extend its open pit gold mine in Guinea through violence, intimidation, and other unethical behavior, according to a report released by Guinean civil society organizations today.

The report examines a multi-year effort by AngloGold and its Guinean subsidiary, SAG, to evict approximately one thousand residents of “Area One” – a part of the village of Kintinian II in the northeastern corner of the country – to make way for a new open-pit mine. Through interviews with nearly one hundred affected villagers, government officials, and company representatives, the authors show that the community was excluded from consultation over the fate of the land, brutally repressed when they organized protests, and coerced into signing relocation agreements that they did not understand and that do not meet international standards.

In March 2015, SAG announced to the Guinean government that it would need to end its existing operations around Kintinian unless it was able to gain access to Area One by May 2016. In the wake of SAG’s threat – which was only too credible in a country from which at least two major mining companies have withdrawn their investments in the last few years – the company and the government were willing to go to great lengths to secure access to the land. “The mining sector in Guinea has been plagued by land grabs, labor violations, broken promises, and even massacres, and AngloGold has perpetuated this pattern at Kintinian,” said Aboubacar Diallo, Program Director for CECIDE, one of the Guinean organizations that authored the report.

The report documents a wide range of abuses against Area One residents, including:

• Physical violence. When negotiations between Kintinian residents and SAG over the terms of relocation broke down, the Guinean government sent security forces, including the “Red Berets,” a group of special forces with well documented links to gross human rights abuses, to force locals to relinquish their land.

These heavily armed personnel brutally repressed peaceful protests, treating the local population as if they were military targets – “as if we were rebels,” in the words of one resident. “They stormed the village to force us to sign the documents and cede our houses,” explained another. Many were injured, including a young girl who was hit by a bullet in her chest and neck, and whose parents just managed to save her life.

The security forces also damaged and stole property in the course of armed attacks on civilians. “The military started to beat us, they stole our telephones, they smashed doors to perpetrate thefts” said one witness. “They broke into my young brother’s shop. They took his money and his merchandise after beating up his shopkeeper,” recalled another.

• Intimidation to achieve relocation goals. Immediately after the suppression of the protest, armed soldiers accompanied SAG’s agents to survey residents’ household assets and pressured them to sign the inventories. “They surrounded the village and they sought out the inhabitants one by one to go to be inventoried by force,” recalled one resident. Residents describe having been “encircled” during the inventory by the military at a distance of “zero meters with hateful faces.” “The soldiers carried weapons and they threatened us to sign,” said one. “The soldiers were present and everyone was afraid.”
• Lack of transparency. AngloGold Ashanti ascribes to international norms on involuntary displacement, which require consultation with the affected population on relocation plans, and that all information should be shared in a language that they can understand. However, the consultant SAG hired to develop its resettlement plan did not consult with residents of Kintinian II. Moreover, villagers were pressured to sign documents in French – which very few can understand – without the opportunity to learn about their rights and options. The agreements they signed may be null and void under Guinean law.
• Exclusion of the vulnerable, including women and children. SAG agents’ meetings with Area One residents were almost entirely with adult men; women and children were largely excluded. Many women testified that they knew nothing of the inventory or relocation process, which was instead managed by their son or husband. As a result, many wives, mothers, and children lost their land, completely without warning.

“We called on SAG last summer to suspend the evictions, but they went ahead with their illegal actions,” said Fréderic Foromo Loua, President of MDT, one of the report’s authors. Residents were forced to leave their homes in May of last year; since then they have been left to their own devices to find temporary accommodations. Most of the affected people continue to hold out for the company to revisit the practices that have caused them harm, while only a few have just recently accepted the keys to the resettlement homes that the company has built for them.

The authors conclude that the actions of AngloGold Ashanti, SAG, and the Guinean security forces violate Guinean law and international standards for involuntary relocation. They therefore:

• Call on the Guinean government to repair the damage caused by its defense and security forces and ensure respect for human rights;
• Demand that SAG and its parent company AngloGold Ashanti carry out a public audit to assess and remedy the involuntary resettlement procedure for Area One; and
• Counsel the Kintinian community to act peacefully in defense of its interests and avoid social division.

Download here:

• Press release in English in PDF
• Press release in French in PDF
• Fact-Finding Mission Report in English
• Fact-Finding Mission Report in French

Media contacts: 

Centre de Commerce International pour le Développement (CECIDE) – CECIDE promotes and defends the social, economic and cultural rights of Guinean communities, and their involvement in the design and implementation of public policies for development.

Les Mêmes Droits pour Tous (MDT) – MDT focuses on the defense and promotion of human rights; it was founded by Guinean lawyers and young professionals in the legal industry to fight human rights violations in Guinea.

MDT and CECIDE have been accompanying the residents of Kintinian since 2010 on issues such as the promotion and defense of rights and obligations, prevention and conflict management, and capacity building for legal experts and local government.

Communities First – A small business working in the area of international development consulting, Communities First LLC provides technical program and advisory services to civil society and government actors on human rights-based development in the context of extractive industries, corporate accountability and natural resource governance.

Communities First is supporting CECIDE and MDT in their work on behalf of the displaced population of Kintinian, as well as other communities in Guinea.

Advocates for Community Alternatives (ACA) – ACA helps West African communities that are threatened by the destructive impacts of extractives-led development to take control of their own futures. ACA works directly with communities to design their own sustainable development plans and advocate to achieve those plans, and it builds and supports networks of lawyers and other professionals that will serve communities in need.

ACA is providing strategic legal support to CECIDE and MDT as part of their participation in the Public Interest Lawyering Network for West Africa (PILIWA), which ACA coordinates.

The post Violence, Intimidation, Exclusion – NGOs report on resettlement at AngloGold Ashanti’s mine in Guinea first appeared on Communities First.

Thanks to excellent co-facilitators from the National Human Rights Commission of Côte d’Ivoire (CNDHCI), Action pour la Protection des Droits de l’Homme (APDH), Ligue Ivoirienne des Droits de l’Homme (LIDHO) and the Agence Nationale de l’Environnement (ANDE), our training covered topics ranging from the legal and regulatory framework, the life cycle of an industrial mine, land and housing rights, a healthy environment, rights of women and minorities, and access to remedy.

I also showed a video recently released by New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map) illustrating how a community in Upper West region of Ghana self-organized to counter companies’ usual divide-and-rule approach, especially by mapping their lands and resources. For the risk and impact assessment, we used a bespoke methodology I developed, borrowing from and building on existing tools, most especially the Getting It Right Human Rights Impact Assessment Guide from the now defunct organization, Rights & Democracy, as well as the Human Rights Due Diligence methodology under development by the Coalition for Human Rights in Development.

The post Assessing mining sector human rights risks and impacts in Côte d’Ivoire first appeared on Communities First.

This translation completes the existing set of publications of this Guide, which includes the original French full-length version, a summary in French, and a summary in English. More information about this publication is available here.

The post Now available! English translation of the Guinea Guide first appeared on Communities First.

How does a community keep a sense of hope alive in the face of the grinding poverty, recurring intimidation, and house-shaking explosions that accompany life next to a gigantic open-pit gold mine? I asked myself this question again and again last week, over the course of a five-day fact-finding mission to investigate allegations of abusive resettlement in Kintinian in Upper Guinea.

The people of Kintinian have long had a poor relationship with Société AngloGold Ashanti de Guinée S.A. (SAG) – the Guinean subsidiary of South African mining giant AngloGold Ashanti – thanks to environmental degradation, unmet demand for local jobs, compensation disputes, favoritism, broken promises, and an overall perceived failure of industrial mining to bring tangible benefits to affected communities. In this context, the company’s decision to relocate about a thousand residents in order to expand into a new zone – called “Area One” – has been highly contentious.

As the Executive Director of Advocates for Community Alternatives, I was asked to join this fact-finding mission by Lien De Brouckere of Communities First, to provide strategic public interest litigation support to two Guinean NGOs: CECIDE and Même Droits pour Tous (MDT). As they publicly affirmed in late August, these two groups are trying to ensure that SAG and the Guinean government respect the communities’ legal rights as the company expands its operational footprint and relocates the residents of Area One. Our fact-finding team also included Guinean journalists and environmentalists, and we were ably supported by a group of courageous local professionals facing tremendous corporate and government pressure. While we have yet to compile and analyze the survey results of the nearly 100 resident property owners our team surveyed, I can say that our anecdotal findings definitely give cause for concern.

First, SAG and the Guinean military worked in concert to carry out an inventory of household assets in Area One in the immediate aftermath of the military’s violent repression of a protest against that very inventory. Military misconduct and violence (including by the bérets rouge – who were involved in the egregious human rights abuses during the stadium massacre of 28 September) were especially high in the days immediately preceding the inventory. This included arrests, threatening to fire on people, burning down huts, destroying homes, shooting tear gas inside people’s homes, widespread looting and more. Suffice it to say that this made people feel intimidated and led them to accept inventories that they deemed incomplete and inadequate. As one of the elders told us: “the gun made us cede our lands.” This raises a number of concerns, including an expectation under the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights to try to prevent public security forces with a track record of human rights violations (such as the bérets rouges) from providing any security services at its sites.

Second, almost no one we surveyed in Area One had heard of, let alone understood the purpose or content of, SAG’s Resettlement Action Plan (RAP), most especially the compensation matrix that determines the values at which SAG will compensate different types of assets. This public document must be developed with the full participation of affected communities, according to international standards on resettlement that AngloGold claims to follow. (In fact, the RAP itself states that affected communities were excluded from consultations to develop it.) In particular, most women surveyed were completely in the dark about the procedure for resettlement and the terms of compensation that were offered to their families, despite a requirement that special care should be taken to ensure that vulnerable and excluded segments of the populations are informed and consulted during resettlement.

Finally, while our analysis will certainly show more cause for concern, I’ll end here by noting that SAG repeatedly tried to pressure community members into leaving their temporary accommodations (their homes having been destroyed since June) and moving to the relocation site, even though construction was not yet finished and the relocation homes had no provision for kitchens, water, electricity, or flood control – a contradiction of SAG’s own Resettlement Action Plan. One such attempt was made the day before our fact-finding mission arrived, in an apparent attempt to ensure that our group would arrive only to discover that the process was finished and that there were no facts to be found.

We’ve asked SAG and AngloGold Ashanti for their responses to a number of these issues and will confront them with the full results of the survey once they’ve been processed. With luck, this intervention can help support non-violence, and guarantee that the people of Kintinian receive the benefit of all the rights and protections of the laws and international standards that AngloGold Ashanti professes to respect.

« Le fusil a fait que nous avons cédé notre terre. » – Réinstallation abusive pour l’expansion d’une mine d’or en Haute Guinée

Comment une communauté peut-elle garder un sentiment d’espoir face à l’extrême pauvreté, l’intimidation récurrente, et les dynamitages qui font trembler les maisons – le tout faisant partie de la vie à côté d’une mine d’or gigantesque à ciel ouvert ? Je me suis posé cette question maintes fois la semaine dernière, au cours d’une mission d’enquête de cinq jours qui avait pour but d’établir les faits à la base des revendications concernant la réinstallation abusive à Kintinian en Haute Guinée.

Les habitants de Kintinian souffre depuis longtemps de mauvaises relations avec la Société AngloGold Ashanti de Guinée S.A. (la SAG) – la filiale guinéenne du géant minier sud-africain AngloGold Ashanti – grâce à la dégradation environnementale, la demande non satisfaite pour les emplois locaux, les conflits autour de la compensation, le favoritisme, les promesses non tenues, et la perception d’un échec global de l’exploitation minière industrielle d’apporter de vrais avantages aux communautés affectées. Dans ce contexte, la décision de la société de délocaliser environ un millier d’habitants afin d’étendre ses opérations dans une nouvelle zone – appelée « Area One » – a été très controversée.

En tant que Directeur Exécutif de l’ONG « Advocates for Community Alternatives », Lien De Brouckere de Communities First m’a demandé de participer à cette mission d’enquête, afin de fournir un appui dans le domaine des litiges stratégiques d’intérêt public à deux ONG guinéennes: le Centre de Commerce International pour le Développement (CECIDE) et Mêmes Droits pour Tous (MDT). Tout comme ils l’ont affirmé publiquement fin août, ces deux structures ont pour objectif dans ce cadre de faire en sorte que la SAG et le gouvernement guinéen respectent les droits légaux des communautés pendant que la société étend son empreinte opérationnelle et déplace les habitants d’Area One. Notre équipe d’enquête comprenait également des journalistes et des écologistes guinéens, et nous avons été bien soutenu par un groupe de professionnels locaux courageux face à la pression énorme des entreprises et du gouvernement. Alors que nous n’avons pas encore compilé et analysé de près les résultats du sondage d’environ 100 propriétaires résidents interrogé par notre équipe, je peux dire que nos résultats anecdotiques sont certainement sources de préoccupation.

Tout d’abord, la SAG et le militaire guinéen ont collaboré pour réaliser un recensement des actifs des ménages d’Area One tout de suite après la répression violente par les militaires d’une manifestation contre le recensement-même. L’inconduite militaire et la violence (y compris par les bérets rouges – qui ont été impliqués dans les violations flagrantes des droits humains lors du massacre du 28 septembre) étaient particulièrement élevés dans les jours précédant immédiatement le recensement. Cela comprend les arrestations, les menaces de tirer sur les personnes, mettre le feu aux cases, détruire les maisons, lancer le gaz lacrymogène à l’intérieur des maisons, le pillage largement répandu, etc. Il va sans dire que cela avait pour effet d’intimider les populations et leur a fait consentir un recensement que les habitants estiment être incomplet et inadéquat. Tout comme l’un des sages nous a dit : «  Le fusil a fait que nous avons céder notre terre. » Ces évènements soulèvent un certain nombre de préoccupations, y compris le non-respect d’une exigence découlant des Principes Volontaires concernant la Sécurité et les Droits Humains d’empêcher la participation des forces de sécurité publique avec des antécédents des violations des droits humains (tels que les bérets rouges) aux services de sécurité sur les sites.

Deuxièmement, presque personne parmi ceux que nous avons interrogé dans la zone « Area One » avait entendu parler – sans parler de comprendre le but ou contenu même – du Plan d’Action de Réinstallation et de Compensation (PARC) de la SAG, surtout son matrice d’indemnisation qui détermine les valeurs auxquelles la SAG compensera différents types d’actifs. Ce document public doit être élaboré avec la pleine participation des communautés affectées, selon les normes internationales en matière de réinstallation qu’AngloGold Ashanti prétend suivre. (En fait, selon le texte du PARC, les communautés affectées ont été exclues des consultations pour son élaboration.) De plus, la plupart des femmes interrogées se trouvait complètement dans le noir concernant la procédure de réinstallation et les modalités d’indemnisation qui ont été offerts à leurs familles, en dépit d’une exigence que des précautions particulières doivent être prises pour assurer que les groupes vulnérables et exclus des populations soient informés et consultés lors de la réinstallation.

Enfin, alors que notre analyse montrera certainement davantage des sources d’inquiétude, je vais me contenter de finir ici en notant que la SAG a tenté à plusieurs reprises d’exercer une pression sur les membres de la communauté pour quitter leur logement temporaire (leurs maisons étant déjà détruites depuis juin) et se déplacer vers le site de réinstallation, alors que la construction n’est pas encore terminé, ils n’ont aucune disposition pour les cuisines, suffisamment d’eau, d’électricité ou de contrôle des inondations – une contradiction au PARC de la SAG. Une telle tentative a été faite la veille de l’arrivé de notre mission d’enquête ; une tentative apparente de faire en sorte que notre groupe de missionnaires n’arriverait que pour découvrir que le processus a été terminé et qu’il n’y avait plus de faits à rechercher.

Nous avons demandé à la SAG et AngloGold Ashanti de répondre à un certain nombre de ces questions et nous allons les confronter avec les résultats complets de l’enquête une fois qu’ils ont été traités. Avec de la chance, cette intervention peut aider à soutenir la non-violence à Kintinian, et de garantir que les habitants d’Area One reçoivent le bénéfice de tous les droits et protections des lois et des normes internationales qu’AngloGold Ashanti professe à respecter.

The post “The gun made us cede our lands” – Abusive resettlement for a gold mine expansion in Upper Guinea first appeared on Communities First.

Written in a question-and-answer format, the 150-page information and toolkit provides basic legal and factual information, tools and strategies on four key subjects of industrial mining (legal regulations, project life cycle, roles and responsibilities, impact assessment), local communities (representation, actions, documentation and monitoring, access to remedy), benefits (royalties and taxes, local content, local development agreements, and financial management), and negative impacts (land acquisition and compensation, environmental pollution, cultural heritage impacts, conflicts). The information and tools are based on domestic DRC laws and regulations, regional and international standards, industry best practice and experiences of civil society organizations and affected communities in DRC and globally.

Download here:

• The document is available in French.

The post Industrial Mining & Local Communities Toolkit – DRC first appeared on Communities First.

The issue paper was co-published in June 2016 by Afghanistan Research Evaluation Unit and GIZ.

Download here:

• The document is available on AREU’s website.

The post A Balancing Act for Extractive Sector Governance in Afghanistan first appeared on Communities First.

What is the difference between an artisanal and an industrial mine? How can we participate in decision-making when only our local chiefs are consulted? How can we stop a mine from coming and who should we speak with about this? Promises were made by the company about local hiring, but they have been broken – how can we respond to this? We don’t have access to information about decisions made by the chefferie authorities – how can we get access to this other information you speak about?

How can we plan for life after the mine and who will care for our older generation? The company’s indemnification valuers went to people’s fields without the owner to calculate the value – is that allowed? During the negotiations about compensation for resettlement, the whole family was not present – how can this be? How can our community access money to organize ourselves and follow this advice you give? Those of us who claim our rights are seen as rebels – what can we do?

These are just a few of the questions I was peppered with by a range of local people affected by industrial gold mining, in the villages of Luhwindja and Kaziba in South-Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I traveled there last month to carry out a series of consultations for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI), together with Prince Kumwam N’Sapu (the DRC Project Manager) as part of a project to develop a Practical Guide, Industrial Mining & Local Communities for the DRC. This Guide is a DRC adaptation of the similar ABA ROLI Guide I led the development of for Guinea. The mission highlighted the many questions and priority concerns of traditional and local authorities and NGOs faced with industrial mining, their actions and results obtained, a keen interest in the initiative of the Guide and our advice, the nature and dynamics of local governance, and better informed the precise level and content of the Guide.

Before the community consultations, we held a two-day South Kivu provincial workshop in Bukavu for about 25 participants representing NGOs, traditional and local authorities from Bukavu and the surrounding area. Before doing a pilot training on half of the Guide’s contents, we facilitated an illuminating session for participants to reflect on their actions to date and what results they had obtained – a first such collective reflection for the participants, not all of whom had met previously. The discussion highlighted that although they had each taken many actions – ranging from advocacy for access to land, to meetings with company representatives, providing literacy training to artisanal miners, drafting case studies and sending memos to the central administration, to conducting environmental and human rights impact assessments – the challenges (corruption!) they faced were even more numerous, and the results they ultimately obtained were few. In all, the take-away for participants was an acute need for more effective strategies and more concerted collaboration between traditional and local authorities, civil society actors, and an urgent need for accountability and demonstrable legitimacy of those acting as representatives of the community vis-a-vis the company and others.

We wrapped up our mission by traveling from the village of Luhwindja to Kinshasa – a trajectory it took us about 24 hours to make, involving 4x4s on disastrously muddy roads, an overnight boat ride, a plane trip, not to mention Kinshasa traffic jams. Once there, we held a meetings with officials of key Ministries, NGOs and the Chamber of Mines, who warmly received our initiative. We are working now to edit the Guide in light of the feedback received, and should have a published version available in February.

Questions et tensions autour d’une mine industrielle d’or au Sud-Kivu

Quelle est la différence entre une mine artisanale et une mine industrielle? Comment pouvons-nous participer aux prises de décisions alors que les seuls à être consultés à cette fin sont nos chefs locaux? Comment pouvons-nous empêcher l’installation d’une mine industrielle et à qui devrions-nous nous adresser à ce sujet? Des promesses concernant les embauches locales ont été faites par la société mais n’ont pas été respectées – comment pouvons-nous y répondre? Nous n’avons pas accès aux informations sur les décisions prises par les autorités de chefferie – comment pouvons-nous avoir accès à ces autres informations dont vous parlez?

Comment pouvons-nous planifier la vie après l’exploitation de la mine et qui pourra prendre soin des générations plus anciennes? Les évaluateurs d’indemnisation de la société se sont rendus sur des terrains en l’absence du propriétaire afin d’en calculer la valeur – est-ce autorisé? Tous les membres de la famille étaient absents durant les négociations concernant la rémunération pour la réinstallation – comment cela est-il possible? Comment notre communauté peut-elle recevoir de l’argent afin de nous organiser tout en suivant votre conseil? Ceux parmi nous qui revendiquent nos droits sont considérés comme des rebelles – que pouvons-nous faire à ce sujet?

Ces dernières ne sont que quelques-unes des questions qui m’ont été posées par de nombreuses personnes locales affectées par l’exploitation minière industrielle de l’or, dans les villages de Luhwindja et Kaziba, dans la province du Sud-Kivu, en République Démocratique du Congo. Je m’y suis rendue le mois dernier pour mener à bien une série de consultations pour l’Association du Barreau Américain au nom de son Initiative Etat de Droit (en sigle ABA ROLI), accompagnée par M. Prince Kumwam N’Sapu (Directeur du Programme d’ABA ROLI en RDC) dans le cadre d’un projet visant à développer un guide pratique pour la République Démocratique du Congo intitulé Minières Industrielles et Communautés Locales. Ce guide est une adaptation au cadre politico-législatif propre à la RDC d’un guide similaire d’ABA ROLI développé pour la Guinée. La mission a mis en évidence les nombreuses questions et les principales préoccupations des autorités traditionnelles, locales et des organisations de la société civile face à l’exploitation minière industrielle, les actions entreprises par ces derniers et les résultats obtenus, ainsi que la nature et la dynamique de la gouvernance locale. Tous nous ont montré un vif intérêt à l’initiative du guide et à nos conseils.. De plus, notre mission nous a permis de mieux nous informer sur le niveau et le contenu du Guide.

Avant les consultations communautaires, nous avons organisé un atelier provincial de deux jours au Sud-Kivu, à Bukavu, qui a accueilli environ vingt-cinq participants représentant des ONG, des autorités traditionnelles et locales de Bukavu et de la région environnante. Avant d’effectuer une formation pilote sur la moitié du contenu de ce guide, nous avons facilité une séance d’éclairage afin d’inciter les participants à réfléchir sur leurs actions et quels résultats avaient été obtenus à ce jour – et ainsi une première réflexion collective des participants, dont certains ne s’étaient jamais rencontrés auparavant. La discussion a mis en évidence le fait que, bien que chacun ait entrepris de nombreuses actions – allant de plaidoyer pour l’accès à la terre, à des réunions avec des représentants d’entreprise, à l’offre de cours d’alphabétisation pour les mineurs artisanaux, à la rédaction d’études de cas et envoi de mémos à l’administration centrale, à mener des évaluations d’impact sur les droits humains et environnementaux – les défis (de corruption!) auxquels ils étaient confrontés étaient encore plus nombreux et les résultats obtenus étaient très faibles. La compréhension des participants était un besoin essentiel afin d’obtenir des stratégies plus efficaces et une collaboration plus concertée entre les autorités traditionnelles et locales ainsi que les acteurs de la société civile. De plus, la compréhension des participants représentait un besoin urgent de responsabilisation et d’une légitimité démontrable de ceux qui agissaient en tant que représentants de la communauté vis-à-vis de la société et de tiers.

Nous avons terminé notre mission en voyageant du village de Luhwindja à Kinshasa – un itinéraire de plus de 24 heures, impliquant l’usage d’une voiture 4×4 sur des routes désastreusement boueuses, une promenade en bateau durant la nuit et un voyage en avion, pour ne pas mentionner les embouteillages de Kinshasa. Une fois arrivés à destination, nous avons tenu une réunion avec des représentants des principaux ministères, les ONG et la Chambre des Mines. Ces derniers ont reçu notre initiative chaleureusement. Nous travaillons maintenant sur l’édition du guide en prenant compte des commentaires obtenus, et une version publiée devrait être disponible dès février.

The post Questions & tensions around an industrial gold mine in South-Kivu first appeared on Communities First.

The post Video available of Q&A hosted by ABA ROLI first appeared on Communities First.

Building on the telephone and other interviews we had conducted before my trip, our meetings in Kabul touched on a wide range of topics, from capacity-building for both government and private sector on impact assessments, to community-based water management, to land rights, to women’s participation in the labor force, to seismic hazards and the accessibility and availability of geologic data, to conflict prevention and peace building, and to the government’s emerging plans for benefit-sharing by focusing on value chains. We were warmly welcomed for these meetings by representatives of the environmental regulator, the ministry of mines, special advisor to the President, a series of NGOs and private sector consultants, among others. We are continuing our interviews remotely and are working on the paper that will be presented at a Govern4Afg High-Level Symposium planned for February 2016 in Kabul.

About the issue paper

Afghanistan is estimated to hold $USD 1 to 3 trillion in untapped mineral deposits, ranging from lootable ones (such as gems, marble, gold, coal, lapis lazuli and the like) to more non-lootable ones (such as iron ore, copper, oil and gas). The extractive sector has existed for centuries in the country, though most of it is artisanal or small-scale, informal with dangerous working conditions, and products smuggled across the border unchecked or through collaboration among smuggling mafia and armed groups operating in the region. The National Unity Government in Kabul has recently set out an elaborate agenda to realize self-reliance over the coming years, according to which, the “extractives industries will be a key source for revenue generation over the next few decades and beyond,” as one of the three pillars alongside the agriculture and transport sectors. Very high hopes are pinned on the idea that extractive sector revenue can soon replace dwindling donor flows and support the government to provide security, avoid bankruptcy and support broader economic development.

Our issue paper will address three key issues related to the planned development of the extractive sector. First, the threshold question of whether the extractive sector can support development and peace in the Afghan context, and which principles may favor development and peace. Second, the environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) process in Afghanistan, including current policy, practice, challenges and recommendations whether on process, substance or implementation of this ESIA process designed to minimize negative impacts and maximize positive outcomes. Third, the topic of extractive sector benefit-sharing and civil society participation, including a definition of the sector’s possible benefits (revenue and others), as well as current policy, practices and challenges concerning civil society participation and benefit-sharing.

Our issue paper on the extractive sector is one of six that will be produced as part of the German-Afghan two-year “Governance Forum Afghanistan: Govern4Afg” project implemented by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), intended to establish a platform for policy dialogue on governance topics in Afghanistan. The Govern4Afg website will be launched in just a few weeks’ time.

The post Talking about extractive sector impact assessment and benefit-sharing in Kabul first appeared on Communities First.