How Further Do women Need to Go?

Tanzania is endowed with a vast and very valuable extractive resource industry consisting of forestry, petroleum and minerals. It is ranked fourth in terms of diversity and richness of mineral resources in Africa, after South Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria.  This includes a wide range of minerals from gold, diamond, colored stones, industrial minerals and gas. Tanzania mining sector is fast growing at an annual average of 10% since 1999 with an average 4% contribution to the GDP.

Mining development has both positive and negative impacts for communities. A growing body of evidence shows that a gender bias exists in the distribution of risks and benefits of mining projects. Benefits, which include employment, income, and compensation, typically accrue to men, and costs, such as family/social breakdowns, cultural harm and environmental degradation, fall most heavily on women and children

Mineral extractions has a lot to do with women than signing MDAs, calculating revenues, or provision of poor health services, water, food, school, road etc in the name of CSR. For long time women movement in Tanzania has touched the subject of extractive but mostly in relation to land grabs, violence against women, environmental degradations but very little efforts have been made by the state to answer to those demands.

Women movement in Tanzania needs to go further to understand the sector and question different gendered issues in relation to extractive  such as Women’s Unseen Contribution to the Extractives Industries and  Their Unpaid Labour, land and food sovereignty in relation to extractive, impact of extractives on women's bodies, sexuality and autonomy etc. (please visithttp://www.womin.org.za/papers.html)

Women's voice  is mostly missing in the CSOs movement on extractive industry. It is a matter of priority in the current resistances around the country and unless women bring in their priorities, the change will be only seen on one side. Individual women and  women organizations and entities, need to go further to challenge the status quo and address women's priorities in relation to extractive. It has to go further than provision of services and seed and food and shelter and clothes and training and skills, it has to go than numbers and statistics and percentage, It has to go  further to women taking active roles on the fronts of the resistance in the extractive industry