Women are no longer scarce in the mining sector and the amount involved is vastly emerging in many areas such as ownership of land and equipment, direct operations and even regulators. Urica Primus, president of the Guyana Women Miners Organization (GWMO) said, “These women are strongly motivated to make a decent living, so their children can go to school, they can help their families and develop their communities.”
She noted that as great as this may be, they are often met with unfair conditions such as gender-based violence, corruption, bullying and even trafficking. Due to the situation of certain mining sites being located in dense areas of the forest, they are hardly any facilities which lead to women becoming even more endangered. The GWMO with assistance from the ICUN NL, the National Committee of the Netherlands of the International Union for Conservation, brainstormed a solution that will assist in the stopping of all illegal activities and guarantee safety for women miners by use of drones and other monitoring apps that help people in the fields to report these activities as they occur. Urica Primus explained that “The app enables women to report misconduct, threats and even injuries immediately, it gives them a lifeline to the appropriate authorities.”
The establishment of this will also motivate women to make strategic decisions that will benefit themselves and add to the growth of the sector. According to Primus, “The monitoring data and reports will help them steer towards evidence-based planning decisions, such as the best location for assistance or health clinics.”
