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A background note, which guides the reader on the general content of the collection and explains some of the key concepts upon which the work is built.
- Paper One is a review of the rights, standards and protections offered by human rights and mining-specific frameworks according to four thematic areas which are relevant to the extractives industries and their impacts on women. The paper makes recommendations for research, development work and campaigns.
- Paper Two addresses women workers’ experiences of sexual harassment, unequal wages, and poor working conditions in the mines of Australia, the US, South Africa and India. It also touches on women’s reproductive work – how it is both incorporated into formal work roles and subsidizes for poor wages and living conditions of workers. The paper concludes with recommendations for future work and research.
- Paper Three addresses the impacts of industrial-scale mining on the land rights and food sovereignty of peasant women and their families. It specifically considers land and water grabs, and the degradation of land and natural resources by mining activities and their gendered impacts on production and food rights. It highlights women’s resistances and concludes with some recommendations for research and action.
- Paper Four argues that mining capital in Sub-Saharan Africa has, for close to a century, carefully extracted and managed women’s unpaid care work to support its labour reproduction requirements lying at the core of its accumulation (profit-making) strategy. The paper considers how to recognise, count and support unpaid care, and makes general recommendations for action through WoMin.
- Paper Five addresses the impacts of extractivism on women’s ability to make safe and informed choices about their bodies, their health and their sexuality. The paper also touches on violence against women arguing that extractivism is a development model that is inherently violent against ecosystems, against workers, against communities and against women.
- Paper Six explores women’s participation – the highest in the world – in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in the Africa region. It addresses gender specific barriers and ways of unlocking these to empower and support women artisanal miners. This paper makes the argument that the transformation of ASM cannot be separated from a wider rethink of the model of extractivism.
The Advocacy Tool offers the reader a useful summary of the different types of frameworks (such as Treaties, United Nations General Recommendations and Comments, African Commission Resolutions, Guidelines and Declarations) and discusses how they can be used by marginalised women and their support organisations to claim rights or effect change.
