The Geita region in Tanzania is rich in gold deposits, which have attracted a lot of small-scale (and a few large) mining companies. In the past, the relationship between mining companies and local communities was negative due to allegations of irresponsible and unethical actions by these companies.
The government is now trying to formalise the sector by issuing licenses and encouraging use of better technologies especially among small-scale miners. However, local people still feel caught between mining companies that want to profit from them and the government who collects taxes from them.
Communities living close to the mines continue to face big challenges such as water scarcity, deforestation, and mercury contamination of water resources. The process of extracting gold leads to the production of ‘tailings’ or toxic left-over material, such as mercury or cyanide, which mining companies often store in water dams. These dams may have leaks, so the toxic material ends up in the water sources used by local communities. We also see a lot of miners who handle mercury for processing gold without gloves which can be very dangerous to their health.
There are also issues of child labour, limited participation of women in the workforce and failing to promote work opportunities to adjacent communities, creating local tensions. The need to promote safe, responsible, inclusive mining practices and better living conditions for the communities directly impacted by these lucrative extractive activities, is very clear.
Amplifying workers’ voices
Since 2021, I have been involved as part of Population and Development Initiatives, who have been working to make sure mining companies in the area respect the rights of workers, communities and the environment. My colleagues and I (including volunteers and workers) have experience in collecting data on responsible mining practices and we have learnt the challenges faced by local communities.
Our aim is to work with them to amplify their voices and ensure they have access to adequate and reliable social services, such as water provision and safely managed toilets to protect people’s health and the environment. In my experience, I have found that once you explain to affected people that we can help amplify their voices, they fully cooperate with civil society and community advocates to promote responsible mining operations.
We have been acting on behalf of these communities with mining companies and government authorities. In most cases, we don’t intervene directly but find ‘community change agents (CCA) through community sensitisation and capacity-building. In the end, it is these agents who lead the way to improve socioeconomic and human rights conditions in mining areas.
For example, we have worked in this way to:
- Identify safe, efficient, and affordable mining technologies that can be used to extract gold.
- Simplify complaint-lodging mechanisms to government authorities.
- Convince mining companies to support social progress in mining areas through corporate social responsibility projects, such as boreholes and toilets in schools.
- Encourage Civil Society Organisation to support mining communities to ensure government authorities are accountable and transparent in how they allocate and spend community development funds.
- Ensure that women and youths working in mining areas get a fair pay for their work.
We have also been addressing the mercury (and other toxic chemical) contamination issues, discussing the safe handling of these metals. We teach miners on best practices to extract minerals and train them to follow national environmental regulations. The government has introduced a national plan (2020-2025) to reduce mercury use and encourage shifting to other safer ways to process gold from its ores, so there is widespread recognition that mercury is bad for the environment.
Developing the tools to address irresponsible mining
To help us do our work we use various tools, including the Mining Site Assessment Tool (MSAT) that PDI adopted from the Responsible Mining Foundation, which looks at 15 different dimensions (outlined below). It helps us to establish constructive dialogue on local employment and community complaint mechanisms in mining areas. The tool also helps ensure that mining companies purchase goods and services from neighbouring villages to promote the well-being of those communities.
The Mining Site Assessment Tool covers the following discussion topics:
- Local employment
- Local procurement
- Air quality
- Water quality
- Water quantity
- Rehabilitation of mining sites and post-closure planning
- Tailings (toxic chemical contamination)
- Safety of communities
- Community complaints mechanisms and grievance
- Safety and health of workers
- Women workers
- Workplace deaths and injures
- Training of workers
- Decent living wages
- Workers’ complaints and grievance
Following MSAT discussions and action, we have received very positive feedback from the people directly affected by these mining practices. These practices impact their health, jobs, the quality of the air they breathe, their local services etc.,all these factors touch their lives. A female miner aged 35 at Nyarugusu ward commented that:
‘The [MSAT] tool is helping us to understand our rights at this mining site [Pamoja Mine]. We just work here but we really don’t know our rights and the way we may successfully claim them from mine management or village governments’.
A leader of a mining association at Nyarugusu ward commented that,
‘We will use the aspects highlighted in the tool to establish miners’ complaints mechanism at this ward. There are poor mechanisms of lodging complaints in our ward something which limits access to rights by miners and affected communities.’
We collaborated with the Responsibility Mining Foundation in Nyon, Switzerland and the Hilden Charitable Fund to promote the use of the Mine Site Assessment Tool, to build good relationships between affected communities and mining companies, and to promote the well-being of women and youth working in mining areas in the Geita district. The MSAT initiatives motivated by the tool have been taken seriously by village governments, mining associations and local CSOs Geita region and they have asked us to expand the initiatives to other mining sites in Lwamgasa, Matabe and Nyakabale, among others.
The MSAT tool has proven to be an effective and replicable approach for sub-Saharan Africa such as Ghana as it is easy to use and can be adapted for many advocacy and research purposes. We have seen that it can help influence how the private sector and governments engage with the small-scale mining sector through dialogue and better mining governance.
Broader challenges and next steps
We have been working with the Sanitation Learning Hub to push the agenda of improved sanitation in mining areas, especially the adequate use of toilets by small-scale miners. We work with the End Water Poverty coalition on a campaign called Claim Your Water Rights to ensure that duty-bearers provide adequate water services to small-scale miners and adjacent communities.
We have established ties with other related initiatives, such as the Alliance for Responsible Mining, the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, the Innovation for Change Africa Hub, GeoGems, Daiichi Institute of Technology and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap to ensure that we properly reach the underserved mining populations in Tanzania together.
We are grateful to the International Peace Information Service (IPIS), based in Antwerp, Belgium, which propelled our passion for responsible mining issues in 2017 with the research project Mapping the Socio-Economic and Human Rights Impact of Mining in Northwest Tanzania. PDI is building on the research findings from this study to design community-based advocacy initiatives that can improve living conditions in mining areas. With the help of social accountability monitoring tools and meaningful dialogue, we believe we will advance responsible mining in Tanzania.
Going forward, we also plan to increase our efforts to reach more local civil society organisations (CSOs) working in mining areas to make the mine site assessment tool known and adopted. Currently many CSOs and mining advocates in Tanzania have no knowledge of the tool.
One of our biggest challenges is to influence mining companies to take responsibly and manage their sites with respect for the rights of the miners, affected communities and the environment. In future, we also want to influence certification mechanisms to recognise mine sites which embrace responsible mining principles. The aspects in the MSAT, among others, touching challenges such as child labour and sanitation will be used to establish grounds for this certification.
In all our work we aim to make our initiatives sustainable. Our goal is to see more people protected from irresponsible profit-making mining activities. But for that to happen, we need to see lots of NGOs and agents of change involved.
This blog has been adapted from the interview Responsible mining: is it possible? The case of the Geita gold mines in Tanzania (kiliza.altervista.org)
About the author:
Alpha Ntayomba is a civil society activist from the Kigoma region in Tanzania, currently living in Morogoro. He is passionate about social accountability monitoring initiatives, which can be broadly defined as what citizens do to hold government and business accountable for delivering essential services to communities. He is Founder and Executive Director of Population and Development Initiatives (PDI) in Kigoma. It’s a non-governmental organisation (NGO) focused on five thematic areas: 1) health and nutrition 2) water sanitation and hygiene 3) environmental education 4) human rights and good governance and 5) economic empowerment for youths and women’s groups.
