For over a decade, WoMin has worked to make visible the costs and losses that extractivist capitalism forces onto African working class and peasant women, their communities, and nature, destroying lives and jeopardising present and future livelihoods. In a system that prioritises profit above all else, we are told that extractivism brings more benefits than costs. Yet, this misleading accounting exercise is based on a selective understanding of who and what counts, and who and what does not count. Or, in other words, whose lives count and whose do not?
To challenge these mainstream cost assessments, WoMin has supported or directly implemented Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR), conducted feminist political economy analyses, written and published case studies and stories, produced films, and undertaken Ecofeminist Impact Assessments. In 2021, we took one step further and started conceptualising a transformed and just cost analysis. We envisaged an Ecofeminist Cost Analysis (ECA) that would embrace the principles of ecofeminism and cross-generational equity and be deeply committed to addressing the ecological and climate crises. But what does that mean practically?
Unpacking the Ecofeminist Cost Analysis
At a theoretical level, the ECA seeks to turn an orthodox economic tool on its head. Corporations, governments or, for that matter, development banks, use cost-benefit analysis to compare total expected costs against expected benefits to determine a mega extractive’s project overall value and feasibility. This is an approach that invariably works for the benefit of profit and that, presented as mathematically sophisticated models that mystify all but the few who “speak the language”, confer greater credibility on those using it. When it comes to communities on the ground, their direct experience of cost benefit analysis is through Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). EIAs put a value on the negative impacts of the extractive project on the livelihoods and lived environments of communities and their possible mitigation or compensation.
Either way, the costs accounted for invariably fall short. They largely ignore the externalised costs women absorb in day-to-day life, costs that are neither accounted for nor compensated in claims against corporations and states. They also fail to address other critical areas of loss, such as psychological and emotional impacts, intergenerational costs, and the significant national wealth attrition resulting from extraction “at any cost”.
“As far as I am concerned, the dam has made us poorer. We are starving because the water is flooding the fields, the cassava is rotting, the yams are rotting. We are truly dead.” – Community woman in Nachtigal, Cameroon
The ECA aims to call their bluff. It seeks to surface these “invisibilised costs”, to quantify or, where possible, attach monetary value to the vast social, ecological, and economic losses associated with mega-extractive projects and the growing climate crisis.
A strategic step
Throughout this journey, we have been mindful of the challenges associated with monetising people’s experiences and losses, which are often impossible to measure in financial terms. A cost analysis necessarily requires assigning a value to elements of nature, such as forests, water bodies, or land, deeply intertwined with the lives of peasant, rural, traditional, and indigenous populations. We categorically reject neo-liberal capitalist efforts to financialise nature and its “ecological services” for profit.
However, WoMin is firmly of the view that strategically advancing reparations and compensation claims, reformist though they may be, is a necessary step. Forcing the internalisation of vast ecological and social costs by capital is an essential step towards achieving deeper revolutionary change. That is to say, when we strategically suggest a counter tool to quantify the impacts and losses forced onto women’s reproductive labour and nature, it is not to push them into capitalist relations. The truth is that, at this point, they are not out of them. Yet forcing them out into the open with the ECA is a step towards refusing these mega extractive projects all together, especially for communities that are being approached with fraught consultations, being sold false promises in exchange for their land and livelihoods.
As for women and their communities that are already seeing their wellbeing and livelihoods impacted, it is a step towards sitting at the negotiating table united and organised in their reparation and compensation claims.
A participatory process
At a practical level, we are convinced that the ECA must be a participatory tool at the hands of the women and their communities that are leading these struggles on the frontlines.
Entrenched gender norms and roles at both household and community levels, translated into women being tasked with reproducing life before and after the arrival of extractive mega projects, before and after the enormous impacts that these projects impose on communities and the ecosystems that they so deeply depend on. It is women who tend the soil, now eroded, to put food on the table; who wash clothes and home that are now permanently soiled because of the unrelenting dust, flooding, and other effects from the project; who cook with now polluted water or water they must buy or fetch way further than they used to; who tend to the sick when illnesses increase because of the decline in living conditions; etc.
“The women are the experts all along; they know what they have lost,” shared Burkinabé feminist activist Odette Toe Napina who played a leading role in facilitating the Bomboré Ecofeminist Cost Analysis. “It is their daily experience that gives them that knowledge. They are the experts of their situation and that of their communities, as well as the costs, the time, and the unpaid labour involved in reproducing life before and after the mine arrived.”
The strength of the struggle lies in the unity of the community and, most importantly, in the unity of the women of the community, whose voices are often excluded in all stages involving the arrival and implementation of mega extractive projects. It is often the case that the arrival of mega extractive projects leads to and even seeks division within communities.
The Road Ahead
Since those first steps in 2021, WoMin has worked with partner organisations and frontline communities in Burkina Faso, Madagascar and, more recently, Cameroon, to pilot several iterations of ECA. As we continue to refine the approach and methodologies of the ECA, these critical explorations into the full range of social, economic, reproductive, cross-generational, and ecological/climate costs will contribute to broader debates and demands for justice and reparations, as defined by women and their communities.
“The ECA provided a space for the women to discuss what they had lost. They knew they had lost money and understood the impact of the mine’s arrival. What the study brought was the ability to strengthen their fight, consolidating their struggle with facts and proven evidence. It has helped them to better structure their resistance. In the past, they would say, ‘We lost…,’ but now the discussions are better informed. Their advocacy is more structured, their knowledge has deepened, and there is greater precision in how they conduct their fight.” – Odette Toe Napina, Burkina Faso
The evidence gathered is already informing local, national, regional and global campaigns led by affected women and their communities to pursue reparation claims related to mega-extractive projects and large-scale weather events fuelled by a rapidly warming climate.
It is thus imperative that the ECA contributes to build unity through its participatory nature. It does not seek to extract knowledge and analysis from the women and their communities, but to collectively build knowledge, rooted in women’s experiences and lives, and deeply respectful of the knowledge that they hold on the wide range of impacts and costs forced onto them – to identify and, where possibly, quantify them, as a basis for organising around compensation and reparation claims, and for advocating for alternatives that respect the wellbeing of the community and its ecosystem.
