WoMin 1299 views

WoMin, launched in October 2013, is an African gender and extractives alliance, which works alongside national and regional movements and popular organisations of women, mining-impacted communities and peasants, and in partnership with other sympathetic organisations, to:

• research and publicise the impacts of extractives on peasant and working-class women
• support women’s organising, movement-building and solidarity
• advocate and campaign for reforms that go beyond short-term reformism to contribute towards the longer-term structural changes that are needed
• advance, in alliance with numerous others, an African post-extractivist eco-just women-centred alternative to this dominant destructive model of development.

Extractivism has very particular impacts upon the bodies, labour, livelihoods and lives of peasant and working-class women in the Global South and increasingly also the Global North. WoMin addresses the substantial area of neglect in the work and activism of traditional natural resources, extractives, environmental and climate organisations and movements. While the mainstream women’s movement has focused much of its attention on questions of violence against women (VAW), political representation and education, it has substantially failed to address the significant economic and social justice questions for African women that occur with this deeply exploitative mode of development.

WoMin has been hosted by the International Alliance on Natural Resources in Africa (IANRA) since October 2013, but took a decision towards the end of 2014 to build as a women-led, women’s rights alliance firmly oriented towards women’s organising and movement-building regionally. WoMin is now legally registered as a Trust and will be operating as a fully independent organisation from January 2016.