The arrival of extractive mining in host communities frequently becomes a catalyst for social, economic, and environmental change. While the issue of gender has received growing attention in the mining sector in recent years, the increased demand for critical minerals has brought with it renewed concerns that marginalised groups, such as women and children, will be negatively affected.
In light of these concerns, this article will explore whether robust and institutionalised regulatory governance translates into better outcomes for women in host communities, using South Africa and Zambia as case studies. To answer this question, the article will discuss how women are uniquely vulnerable to the adverse impacts of mining, why their voices are inadequately represented in policy discussions, and what can be done to address these challenges.
In South Africa, while mining projects can improve living standards for affected communities through infrastructure investments and revenues, mining activities can also strain local communal resources such as water. The presence of a mining project in a community can disrupt its ecological and social fabric in ways that increase the unique burdens facing women, who are often responsible for collecting water, managing subsistence agriculture and carrying out unpaid care tasks within the family.
For example, research undertaken by the NPO Centre for Research on Multinational Companies (SONO), published in June 2021, on the effects of manganese mining in South Africa has shown that communities living near mining projects, and women in particular, were often not meaningfully consulted, lived with various health challenges, and faced pollution risks to their water supplies. This is just one of the various ways in which the proliferation of mining projects can uniquely impact women, whose contributions and livelihoods are crucial to the success of communities, but who continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of mining’s negative consequences.
When a mining project enters a community, policymakers and mining companies often take a gender-blind approach, viewing the community as a homogenous unit without accounting for the fact that women have different roles, responsibilities, and resources. Compared to men, women are, therefore, differently able to respond to the risks and opportunities new and existing mining projects bring.
In contrast, a gender-mainstreaming approach seeks to move beyond single policy initiatives by integrating gender considerations into all transition plans and at every stage of policy development, whether in the mining sector or any other relevant sector.
However, one of the most significant challenges to designing more gender-responsive policies in the mining sector is the relative lack of disaggregated data. One 2022 gendered analysis of South Africa’s mining sector, authored by Tracy Cooper, Michelle Goliath and Dave Perkins, argued that progress in this area is “hampered by a lack of empirical data to support focused policy and praxis interventions. Where gendered policies exist, they are poorly implemented, monitored, and reviewed.”
For this reason, improving the collection and application of such data is essential to increasing awareness and understanding of how sector-specific gendered dynamics perpetuate the structural inequalities that underpin challenges such as gender-based violence in the mining sector. A stronger evidence base would help policymakers and mining companies design prevention programmes, both within companies and local communities, that are informed by context and local impact assessments, making them more likely to be effective.
In short, accurate, reliable and gender-disaggregated data is invaluable in developing evidence-informed policies, programmes, and actions that address women’s needs and challenges.
Apart from improving the collection and application of gender-disaggregated data, stakeholders need to take two other essential steps. The first is to design and adopt gender-responsive policies, frameworks and standards that address the gender-specific challenges facing women. A promising recent example of such a legislative development is the Guidance Note on The Management of GBVF, Safety and Security Challenges for Women in the South African Mining Industry, published under the Mine Health and Safety Act of South Africa.
Second, these policies must be accompanied by institutional capacity building to support their implementation by the national government, mining companies, and civil society organisations. For example, a recent International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) case study published in January this year showed how a South African mining company uses a gender-responsive procurement model that focuses on partnerships between national contractors and local entrepreneurs to support women-owned businesses in Limpopo province.
In the emerging mining town of Kalumbila, Zambia, new copper mining activity has created economic opportunities, leading to notable social and economic transformation and change. Yet, while mining activity has brought new work and a surge of developmental and economic activity, these opportunities often bypass the women of Kalumbila and other host communities.
A 2022 report on the effects of large-scale mining and Covid-19 pandemic on women in the Solwezi and Kalumbila districts documents how women in host communities are not only disproportionately burdened by the environmental, social, economic, and health impacts of large-scale mining, but how weak enforcement of legal frameworks, land resettlement and compensation and poor environmental management have also deepened their exclusion from development opportunities, leaving the significant benefits that mining activity brings to be captured mainly by those few with greater access, education, and economic power.
Displacement, loss of land, and restricted access to natural resources threaten to undermine household food security. Pollution from mining activity contaminates air, soil, and water, forcing women to travel further for clean resources and exposing them to various health risks. This worsens the burden placed on them for domestic care and labour. The influx of migrant workers to mining towns also disrupts established social structures within host communities.
Such contexts are also often associated with a heightened risk of gender-based violence and harassment, an increase in sex work and subsequent sexual exploitation, alongside higher levels of alcohol abuse and rising rates of sexually transmitted infections. Beyond the physical and material hardship, the experience of displacement often comes with the erosion of cultural ties to land and psychological stress.
Additionally, entrenched cultural and gender norms that suggest women should be primarily responsible for unpaid care, food security, and household well-being lead to their underrepresentation in critical mining contexts. Women of host communities are routinely excluded from community consultations, resettlement discussions, and compensation processes, where male household heads dominate the focus and target of mining development objectives. Even when resources are provided, women are rarely in control of their distribution. This lack of a platform for women to safely advocate for themselves becomes a critical barrier to accessing economic independence, pushing them into insecure, informal roles.
Zambia’s mining governance and regulatory frameworks remain gender-blind through structures and policies that leave women largely excluded from decision-making and opportunities. The majority of policy regulation and standards governing the mining sector are often limited in their recognition of gender inequality and women’s rights, failing to do more than vaguely outline their empowerment or refer to the need for formal equality, if they do this at all.
For example, the Mines and Minerals Development Act, No. 11 of 2015 (MMDA), the former legislation that governed and regulated mining activity like exploration, licensing, environmental protection, and mineral royalties in Zambia, failed to explicitly address gender equity in terms of access to licences, participation in mining activities, or protection from gender-based discrimination within the sector. Meanwhile, and more worryingly, the Minerals Regulation Commission Act, No. 14 of 2024 (MRCA), which repealed the MMDA in 2024, fails to reference gender at all, effectively excluding the minimal recognition of gender that existed before. This signals a step backwards in terms of embedding gender equality in mining law and in recognising how women in host communities are uniquely and disproportionately affected.
Again, consultations with the community, which are often promoted as a critical phase for securing social licences to operate, frequently overlook the realities of, and impacts on, women in host communities. Cultural norms that privilege men or the male-headed household model as legitimate and comprehensive representation of the community, alongside the lack of strong, legally enforceable frameworks that specifically require women’s participation, leave women with little recourse when their livelihoods are disrupted. While compensation and grievance mechanisms exist, they are weakly enforced, further entrenching social, economic, physical and psychological invisibility and exacerbating their insecurity.
Ultimately, cultural norms and practices that prioritise male authority, alongside the absence of clear accountability, meaningful participation, and enforceable protections, reinforce systemic disempowerment in mining communities, creating a cycle of marginalisation.
Countries, like Zambia that are already part of critical frameworks like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and Maputo Protocol must leverage these frameworks to reinforce accountability and inclusivity. In addition, guidance from multilateral and continental institutions such as the UN Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals and the African Minerals Governance Framework provides policymakers with useful starting points.
South Africa shows that, despite having a more advanced and detailed policy environment, it doesn’t necessarily translate to full effectiveness and impact. Both Zambia and South Africa face significant challenges in establishing and translating targeted-gender policies into meaningful outcomes for women in host communities.
In the absence of serious policy and behavioural reforms, there is a real danger that the global energy transition will occur at the expense of local communities and the environment in mineral-rich African countries.
Addressing these imbalances requires reframing stakeholder engagement; how ownership of impacts and responsibility are considered, a clear assumption of responsibility by all stakeholders, and a commitment to establishing and implementing targeted, gender-mainstreamed policy interventions.
Finally, reframing stakeholder engagement with host communities is not only about compliance but also about using the critical minerals transition as a vehicle for transformative and equitable development. Stakeholder investment must prioritise long-term, sustainable resolutions, develop resilient pathways for women to actively benefit from mining, and enable them to become active agents of change.
Adrian Joseph
Adrian Joseph is a research fellow in the Climate and Natural Resources Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), where he works on the issue of critical minerals. Before joining SAIIA, he spent time at the Brenthurst Foundation as a Machel-Mandela fellow and is a former Konrad Adenauer Stiftung scholar. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Honours Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Cape Town.
Mischka Moosa is a data journalist at GGA. She holds a Bachelor of Social Science with majors in Gender Studies and Political Science that she obtained from the University of Cape Town. Her focus of interest is on decolonial approaches to justice, development and transformation in Africa.
