Do Cooperatives Improve Female Miners’ Outcomes? A Case Study of Rwanda

Abstract

Many African countries have encouraged the creation of local cooperatives in their efforts to legalize artisanal and small-scale mining. This exploratory case study of Rwanda's largest mining cooperative examines how cooperative business models, rather than direct company employment, might mitigate women's vulnerabilities in extractive industries. Through feminist political ecology's intersectionality framework, this research asks how cooperatives might improve women's outcomes along three lines—financial gains, gender violence reduction, and legal awareness and empowerment. Qualitative inquiry directly draws from semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, and participant observations, and indirectly from mapmaking workshops, with women who are full-time employees, seasonal miners, and farmers near six extraction sites. Based on content analysis in NVivo, this study finds the selected cooperative does not improve women's financial outcomes or lower violence rates compared to private companies in Rwanda. A specific form of gender violence, coerced transactional employment sex, is higher in the cooperative. However, cooperative work may expand women's rights conceptions and legal consciousness. Cooperative members demonstrated a greater understanding of supply chains, government functions, and conflict resolution pathways. These results indicate that cooperatives are not a panacea for rural women’s marginalization but are a starting point for enhanced understandings of socio-economic and legal equities.