"COP29 spotlights critical minerals as African women count the cost", 13 November 2024

While tens of thousands attend the UN COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, a group of more than 120 grassroots African female activists have snubbed the talks and already attended a “counter-COP” in Senegal.

Members of the Women’s Climate Assembly (WCA) are seeking reparations for environmental and social damages inflicted by historic mining, and a greater say in the extraction of critical minerals needed for the world’s transition to clean energy.

“We support an energy transition, but if it will involve children in mines, we are against it, if it involves women getting sick and being exploited, we are against it,” Oumou Koulibaly, a WCA member based in Senegal, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

At October’s African Peoples Counter COP, activists shared experiences of the harmful impacts of mining, from communities displaced by new gold mines in Burkina Faso, to water contamination from Guinea’s aluminum mines.

Meanwhile in Baku on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke following the conclusion of an expert panel on critical minerals.

“Too often we see the mistakes of the past repeated in a stampede of greed that crushes the poor,” he said.

“We see a rush for resources, with communities exploited, rights trampled and environments trashed. We see developing countries ground down to the bottom of value chains, as others grow wealthy on their resources,” Guterres said...

Africa holds over 40% of the world’s reserves of transition minerals like cobalt, lithium and copper – all key to green technologies such as electric vehicles and solar panels...

As COP29 discusses what should happen, female activists in Africa want action so that history does not repeat itself, with minerals enriching international mining companies and local people left with little apart from environmental damage.

The African activists’ meeting and WCA said African voices have been largely excluded from COP meetings, where they said Global North governments and corporations renege on promises, such as not delivering climate funds where they are needed....

The resources needed for green energy devices like solar panels and batteries will entail much more extraction of minerals such as cobalt and lithium, said Samantha Hargreaves, the director of WoMin, a Pan African ecofeminist alliance.

Africa should act as a unified bloc to control the mining and trade of critical minerals, she said, as mining projects have often left women with limited access to public services, water and energy, and vulnerable to sexual violence.

The United Nations Trade and Development agency (UNCTAD) contributed to the UN panel report and plans to work with countries to help obtain more community benefits from mining and build “value-added” industries like domestic processing.

Luz María de la Mora, director of UNCTAD’s Division on International Trade and Commodities said women have lower salaries in the sector, and often have to support families alone when men are forced to leave communities to find mining work.

“We need to make sure that the new era of critical energy transition minerals does not replicate the same kind of models that we have been seeing,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at COP29.

However, de la Mora warned this work will take time, including the creation of a legal regulatory framework that is binding for governments and companies.

“I think it starts with a good assessment. And this is where we are right now,” she said...."