Do Cooperatives Improve Female Miners’ Outcomes? A Case Study of Rwanda

Abstract

Many African countries have encouraged the creation of local cooperatives in their efforts to legalize artisanal and small-scale mining. This exploratory case study of Rwanda's largest mining cooperative examines how cooperative business models, rather than direct company employment, might mitigate women's vulnerabilities in extractive industries. Through feminist political ecology's intersectionality framework, this research asks how cooperatives might improve women's outcomes along three lines—financial gains, gender violence reduction, and legal awareness and empowerment. Qualitative inquiry directly draws from semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, and participant observations, and indirectly from mapmaking workshops, with women who are full-time employees, seasonal miners, and farmers near six extraction sites. Based on content analysis in NVivo, this study finds the selected cooperative does not improve women's financial outcomes or lower violence rates compared to private companies in Rwanda. A specific form of gender violence, coerced transactional employment sex, is higher in the cooperative. However, cooperative work may expand women's rights conceptions and legal consciousness. Cooperative members demonstrated a greater understanding of supply chains, government functions, and conflict resolution pathways. These results indicate that cooperatives are not a panacea for rural women’s marginalization but are a starting point for enhanced understandings of socio-economic and legal equities.

Keywords:

• Mining cooperatives
• gender violence
• legal consciousness
• intersectionality
• content analysis
• Africa

Ethical approval

This research was approved by the Republic of Rwanda's National Council of Science and Technology on September 26, 2020 (approval no. NCST/482/197/2020). It was conducted under the supervision of the University of Rwanda's College of Science and Technology (CST) and CST's Center for Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management. It adheres to the ethical guidelines of the Helsinki Declaration (updated in 2018). All participants were verbally informed of their rights as human subjects and provided informed consent.

Acknowledgments

The author extends her sincere thanks to James McQuilken and Jeroen Cuvelier for their detailed comments on the first drafts of this article. A ‘thank you’ as well to the anonymous reviewers for their extensive feedback. Our research team—Aline Providence Nkundibiza, Placide Habinema, and Cedrick Leon Igiraneza—endeavoured tirelessly. Above all, my deepest gratitude goes to the women who gave me their time, their stories, and their trust. All data presented in this article is available upon request to the author at [email protected], with an understanding of ethics limitations for protecting research participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the author.

Notes

1 For example of Rwanda setbacks in legalization, there have been documented reports of the smuggling of 3T minerals from DRC across the border into Rwanda and then tagged as Rwandan production, including a recent UN Midterm Report from 2020 (Sharp, Behalal, Catalán, Sollazzo, Vogel, & Zounmenou, 2016). These reports include allegations that Rwanda Defense Force soldiers were complicit in the smuggling and in violence against civilians near Congolese mines (Schütte, Franken, & Mwambarangwe, 2015; Hanai, 2021; Postma, Geenen, & Partzsch, 2021).

2 All transactional sex is defined in this study as a form of GBV in these six communities because it exists on a broader continuum of men’s exercise of gendered power and control over relatively vulnerable women. For further reading on this systemic link and women’s agency, please see Thaller and Cimino (2017) and Ranganathan et al. (2017).

3 Exact averages for key outcomes from NVivo can be seen below:

Table

4 Contracts and monthly salaries paid into bank accounts are only for higher administrative staff with formal education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a generous grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, for which the author served as a 2021 HFG Distinguished Scholar.