Just over 15 years ago, in June 2006, local villagers in the Chiadzwa area of Eastern Zimbabwe’s Marange district discovered diamonds. A diamond rush ensued, and thousands flooded the fields, hoping to find fortune. In less than five months, the situation turned grave. As police took control of the fields, torturing, beating, harassing, arresting, imprisoning, and even killing those deemed to be illegal miners, the once peaceful Chiadzwa was radically transformed. Men and boys suffered significant abuse and torture, but gendered structural violence, which had always subjugated women and girls, was intensified and even institutionalized. Sexual assault and rape, for example, were purposefully weaponized to discourage illegal diamond mining, with hundreds of women affected.

This gendered violence was extreme but not exceptional. As an economic model, large-scale extractivism puts profit and growth over people and the planet. It drives inequality precisely because extractions are conducted under certain conditions and without the consent of the local people. Whether it involves diamond mining in Chiadzwa or drilling, logging, or industrial agriculture in other parts of the Global South, extractivism disproportionately affects women and girls. Supported by the Ford Foundation, a new landscape analysis from The SAGE Fund—“Building Power in Crisis: Women’s Responses to Extractivism”—documents that in communities where gender discrimination is already the norm, rampant natural resource extraction and depletion results in women and girls having increased responsibilities and risks. They are, for example, burdened with additional caretaking when men migrate for higher-paying jobs. They are forced to farm less fertile land that produces poor yields. Their movement is constrained by private security forces or government actors. They are targeted for speaking out against extractive projects. Their reproductive and respiratory health suffer. They are forced into exploitative sex work.

Over the past decade, WoMin’s research has shown, time and time again, that women carry the heaviest burden and experience extreme trauma when natural resources are taken from their land and exported on a massive scale.

“Building Power in Crisis” is part of a recent Ford initiative to highlight the critical intersection of environmental destruction, gender inequality, and civic engagement. In addition to documenting the drivers of extractivism and its disproportionate impact on women and girls, the report finds that there are devastating ripple effects when women and girls are denied control over land and natural resource management. In most of the Global South, women farmers produce between 40-80% of food. They also collect and save seeds, play invaluable roles in forest conservation, and steward local water systems. Extractivism disrupts all of these roles and relationships, but bold women leaders are fighting back, becoming agents of change—and building, transforming, and confronting power—even when their health, safety, and livelihoods are on the line.

Read the full article about extractivism and women by Ximena Saskia Warnaars at Ford Foundation.