The United Nations has started a new campaign to ensure gender equity in the extractive industries, underlining a fact now well established that exploitation of natural resources affects women much more than it does men.

“Women are often more vulnerable to the risks associated with extractive industries — for instance, environmental degradation and family disruption — while men are better positioned to take advantage of its benefits, such as employment or supplier contracts,” concludes a June report by International Alert on gender issues in Uganda’s oil and gas sector.

Through its agency for women, the UN has partnered with Publish What You Pay (PWYP) to integrate gender perspectives into natural resource governance. PWYP is a network of more than 800 civil society organisations pushing for an open and accountable extractive sector. 

Now UN Women and PWYP have issued a toolkit titled “Extracting Equality” that reviews the extractive process with a bias towards increased participation by women.

The aim is to ensure that the promise that all citizens should benefit from their countries’ resources does not remain a pipe dream.

“The extractive industries have the potential to drive immense economic and social development. However, it is vital that we consider how everyone is affected: Women and men, and whole mining communities,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women executive director. 

“If extractive projects are not inclusive and sustainable — including employment practices that are gender-sensitive, and community investments that impact positively on gender equality and women’s empowerment — there are real risks to social stability, inclusive growth and development, and even security,” added Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka.

The toolkit examines the extractive value chain, from how much natural resources a country has to how a project should be dismantled when its lifecycle comes to an end.

At each step, the toolkit offers guiding questions over the specific considerations and main issues to ensure women are not left out of natural resource governance. For example, it demands greater involvement in negotiating the best deal possible and how the money earned from natural resources should be spent. These, along with whether to extract, have tended to be the sticky points in the value chain.

“We need to ask how much have women been involved, or how the particular impact of extracting natural resources on their lives has been considered, when making laws and policies that eventually guide extraction activities,” said Winfred Ngabiirwe, the national co-ordinator for the PWYP chapter in Uganda.

“Ensuring that women are active participants in development and in community decision-making is good for women, good for families, good for those communities, and ultimately good for business. Where it has not happened such as Hoima, where our oil shall soon be produced, you can already see the early seeds of social and communal disharmony.

“The government realised this and is trying to do something about it by, for instance, involving women when paying out compensation,” added Ms Ngabiirwe, who also heads the NGO Global Rights Alert.

Nearly all the East African countries have ratified international conventions that emphasise the recognition, respect, protection and promotion of gender equality. Tanzania has passed legislation on the involvement of women in its extractive industries.

Similar commitments are contained in Rwanda’s energy policy and Uganda’s laws, in which at least three board members of the Petroleum Authority must be women.

Yet a gender-based analysis of the oil and gas extraction industry in East Africa by the Akina Mama wa Afrika NGO concluded that these commitments were few relative to the number of women and the extent to which extractive activities affect them; they were not being fully implemented; and there were no serious consequences for non-implementation.