While communities across Guinea were under Covid-19 shelter-in-place orders, a joint venture owned by mining giants Alcoa and Rio Tinto relocated more than a hundred families to expand its sprawling bauxite mine. Residents of Hamdallaye village in the Boké region of Guinea, who have been seeking redress for the loss of their ancestral farmlands and livelihoods to the mine, say that Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée (CBG) moved them to an unfinished resettlement site without adequate housing, water and sanitation, or sufficient arable land and sustainable livelihood opportunities. The surprise move took place prior to the commencement of a long-awaited World Bank-backed mediation between the community and CBG, which had been scheduled for March 2020 but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, among other issues.

A report released today by Guinean organizations Centre du Commerce International pour le Developpement (CECIDE) and Association pour le développement rural et l’entraide mutuelle en Guinée (ADREMGUI), and the US-based Inclusive Development International, documents how CBG’s resettlement of Hamdallaye village violates the environmental and social requirements of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector lending arm. The IFC bankrolled CBG’s expansion along with a syndicate of US, German and French public and private lenders.

According to the report the dust and dynamite blasting from CBG’s mining activities had made living conditions at the community’s former two-hundred-year-old village unbearable and gave the residents little choice but to accept relocation. The families were relocated – in the middle of a government-ordered lockdown – to a resettlement site that was incomplete, with only one working water well at the time of the move, as well as unfinished houses and other poorly constructed infrastructure...