As the rich and powerful meet to discuss how best to secure, extract, process and transport Africa’s natural resource wealth at the African Mining Indaba, women from extractives-impacted communities will be meeting just a few kilometres away to put forward the alternatives. Investors, international finance institutions (like the World Bank), African multi-lateral institutions and our governments keep telling us that there are no alternatives to the extractives-centred development trajectory we find ourselves on.
We disagree! There are alternatives that people, and especially peasant and working class women, live every day. These are OUR alternatives, and these are the alternatives that people, eco-systems and the planet need NOW if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change!
The WoMin gender and extractives regional alliance, in partnership with Women from Mining Affected Communities United in Action (WAMUA) and dozens of other civil society organisations from across the region, will gather at the Alternative Mining Indaba and in our own public events and strategy sessions to identify and discuss the alternatives, and strengthen unity amongst ourselves. Various sessions have been opened to the public and to the media.
Who Should Attend: Local and African journalists working in gender, environment and extractives, civil society commentators, and academic and community journalists.
Schedule
- SEMINAR:
Extractives Industries and Women – RESISTANCE AND ALTERNATIVES
Date: Tuesday 10 February, 10:30-3:15pm
Venue: Doubletree Hotel, 31 Brickfield Road, Woodstock, Cape Town. See map here.
- PUBLIC EVENT:
Infrastructure for Whom? Mining and the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa
Date: Tuesday 10 February, 5:30-7:30pm
Venue: Doubletree Hotel, 31 Brickfield Road, Woodstock, Cape Town. See map here.
- PUBLIC MEETING:
Africa Rising? Speakers from Congo/ Mauritius, Mozambique, South Africa and Nigeria
Date: Tuesday 10 February, 6-8pm
Venue: AIDC Solidarity Centre, 129 Rochester Road, Observatory, Cape Town
- PUBLIC EVENT:
The state of the women’s movement in Africa: feminist alternatives, feminist hope
Date: Thursday 12 Feb, 1:30-4pm
Venue: Community House, Salt River Road, Salt River, Cape Town
Who will inspire our discussion?
- Emem Okon, is the founder of the Kebetkache Women Development & Resource Center in Nigeria, a community action, education and advocacy organization supporting feminist organising against the devastating impacts of the oil industry there.
- Shereen Esoff, a respected Zimbabwean feminist, activist, popular educator, and academic, Shereen leads JASS Southern Africa’s programs on women’s rights, empowerment, and movement-building in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and at the regional level.
- Mercia Andrews is a land rights activist and leading organiser of the Southern Africa Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA). As a member of the Rita Edwards Collective in Cape Town she has been deeply involved in efforts to think through alternative paths to feminist movement-building. She was very active in the 2012 farmworkers’ uprising in South Africa.
- Isabel Casimiro, President of the feminist alliance, Forum Mulher in Mozambique, is the coordinator of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique. She is a contributor to the 2008 book ‘African Women’s Movements: Transforming Political Landscapes’ and other works related to the women’s movement in Mozambique. Forum Mulher is the current global host for the World March of Women.
Background to this conversation
The Africa region, and the majority of peasant and working class women here, are in great need of vibrant movement that offers a platform for women to organise, be in solidarity and struggle for alternatives to a dominant patriarchal capitalist development model. But, the movement is failing women. The challenges are many and diverse, including the dominance of party-political affiliated women’s organisations; the depoliticisation of struggle through technical gender mainstreaming discourse and strategy; and the substantial failure of progressive civil society organisations to accommodate a feminist perspective and support women’s organising for the needed wider systemic change.
There are, however, pockets of women’s movement in the region, shaped very explicitly by a feminist perspective (in all of its diversity) which recreate the world in struggle and propose systemic transformations. This session aims to explore some of these questions, challenge us, and inspire our thinking and practice of feminist movement-building.
WoMin is a regional feminist alliance which unifies African women in the fight against resource extraction which destroys land, eco-systems, livelihoods and lives. WoMin seeks to advance alternatives from the perspective of the majority of Africa’s citizens – peasant and working class women – for a more just, equitable and eco-friendly African development agenda.
For more information about WoMin and their work please visit www.womin.org.za or find them on Facebook.
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