Gender and Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining in sub-Saharan Africa and “Formalization” efforts: Some preliminary findings

In this talk we examine recent but uneven attempts to include gender, more specifically “women,” in global, continental and national efforts to strengthen mining as a sustainable economic sector in Africa.  More specifically, we examine artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), which is also increasingly recognized as integral to efforts at regulating the mining sector. Drawing on our two ongoing research projects with African and Canadian colleagues on women’s livelihoods in ASM in six sub-Saharan African countries, we highlight structures and structuring powers operational within ASM sites which have implications for interventions under the umbrella term of “formalization.”’ Policy directions such as these bring into sharp relief, we argue, the gendered social organization and authority relations already shaping ASM and which are likely to be impacted by formalization initiatives.

Bios :

Doris Buss is a professor of law in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, whose research explores the socio-legal dimensions of law and human rights, women’s rights, the gender of armed conflict and its aftermath, and feminist theory. She is the co-author (with Didi Herman) of Globalizing Family Values: The International Politics of the Christian Right (Minnesota Press, 2003), co-editor (with Ambreena Manji) of International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (Hart, 2005), and co-editor (with Joanne Lebert, Blair Rutherford, and Donna Sharkey) of Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: International Agendas and African Contexts (Routledge, 2014).

Blair Rutherford is a professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Carleton University. He was the founding director of Carleton’s Institute of African Studies and has been researching on the cultural politics of livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa for over twenty years. Among other publications, he is the author of Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in postcolonial Zimbabwe (Zed, 2001) and Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics (Indiana University Press, 2017).