Women in mining Nigeria network reaches all six geopolitical zones within a year
NIWIMNRO has taken its work with women artisanal miners from three states to six since last summer, adding protective equipment, mobile medical visits and cooperative registration to the training programme it began with. It was recognised in Abuja on Thursday with EnergyNet’s Leadership Award.
Around sixty women working Nigeria’s artisanal mines now have helmets, gloves and boots supplied through NIWIMNRO, an addition the organisation made after its own field visits found women working without any protective equipment at all. Medical personnel now travel into mining communities as well, examining women who had previously worked without attention to their health.
The organisation was working in three states last summer, Niger, Kaduna and Nasarawa. It now works in six, which between them cover all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones. Executive Director Felicia Dairo credited the expansion to partners including the Australian High Commission, whose funding opened three of those states, and told the room in Abuja on Thursday that the pace has come from support rather than from the organisation working alone.
What has changed most is what happens after the training. NIWIMNRO is now organising women miners into cooperatives and working with the federal government to get them formally registered, on the reasoning that a registered cooperative can access finance and hold a licence that carries commercial weight. An unregistered woman working a site has neither. Dairo described the object as taking women who currently operate informally and giving them a structure capable of entering commercial arrangements and winning contracts.
The organisation has also moved upstream into the law itself. It is working through the Minerals Act to identify where the framework leaves women out, with the intention of taking those gaps to policy level. Under a memorandum signed with the Africans for Africa Initiative at AFNIS in June, it became implementation partner for community development in Nigerian mining, overseeing health, education and water programmes funded through mining royalties and acting as liaison between investors and host communities.
Several boreholes have been completed across the communities NIWIMNRO works in over the past year, one of which was commissioned in Niger State last July.
EnergyNet presented its Leadership Award to the organisation at its Abuja offices on Thursday morning, with Dairo accepting on behalf of the organisation. She said the recognition strengthens confidence within a team that has built all of this in a little over a year, and that it belongs to the women working the sites rather than to the office.
