By Mabinty M. Kamara
Imagine a situation where poor parents give birth to many children that they cannot adequately cater for in terms of providing them education, proper health care, and moral upbringing. When these children grow up, they become huge liabilities to not only their parents, but also to the communities where they are. Some, particularly the girls, sometimes engage in prostitution with all its attendant risks, drugs, and other anti social activities where they are exposed to all sorts of sexually-transmitted diseases.
More often than not, when they become pregnant, the girls give birth to children with no fathers. These children grow up facing the same challenges their parents faced. It’s a vicious cycle.
This is the reality in a typical mining community in Sierra Leone.
The problems
The activities of mining companies are mostly labour intensive, which is why they tend to favour mostly male employees, leaving the women folks jobless. According to some women’s rights activists, this is largely not unconnected to the lack of formal education and technical knowhow among women. They say most women are either school dropouts or never went to school at all, all of which are mostly influenced by the same mining activities.
Businesses such as Tele Centers, pubs, cinemas, and shops, which can be alternative sources of livelihoods for those who can’t get mining jobs, are all dominated by male youths in mining communities.
“Farming, which used to be a source of self-employment for women, have been taking away [by the activities of companies] yet the companies cannot employ them due to their level of education,” Augusta Nwoma, a leading campaigner of women’s rights in the mining sector, said.
She said the situation has become so rampant that some women now tend to feel comfortable with the menial jobs.
Augusta is the founder and Coordinator of the Women’s Initiative Forum for Empowerment in Extractive (WIFEE), an advocacy organization based in the Rutile community which is host to Sierra Rutile, the leading miner of the Titanium mineral, Rutile. She told Politico that there are lots of challenges facing women in the mining communities, like domestic violence, sexual penetration, all of which she said have fueled poverty.
Augusta said most of the men who seek employment in the areas, some of them from outside the district, come single and they take advantage of vulnerable women.
“They will need the community women for services like sex and other things. At the end, you find out that the communities will record a high number of teenage mothers, single mothers and school dropouts,” she said.
Agriculture, which used to be the only source of livelihoods and employment for many families and women in particular, have been destroyed by the operations and activities of mining companies.
In Kono, for instance, much of the land where women used to farm now fall within the concession of Koidu Limited, the diamond mining giant. The Swamp around the 555 Bridge in Koidu Town and Monkey Hill area, a thick forest with rich biodiversity that would have made a productive farm land, have all been taking away.
A report done by the campaign group Network Movement for Justice and Development (NMJD) in 2018 cites the activities of Sierra Mineral, better known as Vimetco and Sierra Rutile Limited, as two of the leading causes of impoverishment in Sierra Leone.
Both companies operate in the neighboring districts of Moyamba and Bonthe in the southern part of the country. Vimetco mines Bauxite.
The NMJD report reveals that dredge mining by the two companies is leaving waste arable lands on which community people had depended on for farming and which used to be their main source of livelihoods.
Waste arable lands firstly reduces the amount of land available to the community for farming, and as the amount of available land reduces in the community, people begin to travel far from their traditional homes in search of farm lands. In all of this, the women bear the greatest burden of carrying loads and piggybacking the kids to and from the farms on a regular basis, the report notes.
Admire Favour Yorpoi has over ten years work experience with the Women’s Forum Network on Mining and Extractives in Kono. She said a lot of the issues women face in mining communities are the results of ineffective consultation in decision making processes about the activities of the miners.
“Women are not adequately represented in [local] committees and so they have very little to contribute and benefits from the community development funds allocated to their communities,” she said.
Poverty is always the end product of the entire predicament that befalls women in mining communities. In a situation where all sources of livelihoods like employment, business and farming have failed, the people continue to be poor and dependent upon whatever they have that they think can get them out of that situation.
This is how most families end up giving up their girls to early marriage or approved sexual relationships, thinking it’s the best way out since the man can at that time cater for the girl and the family.
This has proven mostly to be a step in the wrong direction because those relationships are sometimes short-lived, after they would have produced children leaving the girls and their families to wonder about and the kids with a bleak future.
This way, mineral resources, instead of being a blessing to these communities, turn out to be a course.
The way out
Ms Nwoma suggests that the government and the mining companies, as part of their corporate social responsibilities, should consider providing soft loans and other employment schemes for women in these communities to help ease the burden.
“Most of the female bread winners, who do not have enough resources to cater for their children, see them as a tool to ease the burden of poverty hence they hand them over to men at an early age,” she said.
Strong policies and laws on early marriages and sexual offences, she added, can also help put a halt to issues like early marriage and teenage pregnancy. She said such policies and laws must take account of the role of the parents, companies and spouses, who are often employees of the companies.
“With strong laws and policies that will cost perpetrators long jail terms and loss of employment benefits, I believe that men in mining communities will advise themselves to stay off minors knowing the consequences,” added Yorpoi.
© 2019 Politico Online
