Olinda Orozco, Peru
"I consider it important that public policies, development projects and different research on ASM have a gender approach"
Olinda Orozco
Executive President
Red Social
Lima, Peru
Olinda Orozco, Executive President of the Social Development Networks Institute - Red Social, shares her experience of 18 years in management and leadership of development projects with a gender perspective for artisanal and small-scale mining in Peru.
What can you tell us about your background and work around artisanal and small-scale mining?
I am a sociologist by training and work as a consultant on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and gender. I have been involved with ASM since 2004, when I started working on training projects for organizations of women artisanal miners and environmental care, technical training in responsible practices for miners and the implementation of international fair trade standards for artisanal gold, among other topics.
This work has allowed me to maintain solid relationships and links with miners, mining companies, their associations or companies in the different regions of the country, including Madre de Dios.
What was it that led you to specialize in gender and ASM?
Women make up half of the world's population, but our lives and the realities we carry out differ from those of men. Many times, the roles we play are underestimated and invisible, especially in vulnerable sectors. One of those realities is the mining space, which is recognized as masculine.
It is said that ASM represents an opportunity for men and women from vulnerable sectors by generating self-employment and, that in practice, it has been having economic and social importance in the country's economic indicators. There are also women artisanal miners, whether in productive work roles as owners or partners of companies or associations of miners and miners or as workers, pallaqueras, that is, in the first and last link of the artisanal gold value chain, in addition to of the invisible role of caring for their families and the roles that they are acquiring in the life of the artisanal mining community. This reality, which is little known, has led me to make the work of ASM women miners visible from a gender perspective.
We experienced this reality in a workshop of a meeting of artisanal mining women that took place in the city of Chala in 2018, where women miners from the regions of Ayacucho, Puno and Madre de Dios participated. One of the activities consisted of drawing infographics or talking maps of the activities they carried out at work.
An important difference was that the women miners of Madre de Dios were entrepreneurs and had concessions that carried out the management and administration of the mining operations, unlike other women miners who were mostly 'pallaqueras' (from the Quechua word 'pallaq', an ancestral practice of manual selection of minerals) or mineral recyclers, an activity that corresponds to the last link in the ASM value chain.
In 2020 we carried out a consultancy on gender and alluvial mining for USAID Peru’s PREVENT Project where we conducted a series of interviews, including to the women miners who owned formal operations in Madre de Dios, which allowed us to learn about and delve into the activities and responsible practices carried out by these ASM women in this region.
What interesting facts came from the studies you have conducted?
An interesting fact that I gathered from the interviews is related to the cultural beliefs of women and mines.
In filonian mining, which is the extraction of rock inside tunnels, women are prohibited from entering the mines because, according to cultural belief, the Pachamama is a woman, and she gets jealous, making her hide the vein of gold.
This differs from alluvial mining, where the gold is spread in the open, in piedmont deposits or terraces in the Amazon mountains and Amazon river and mountain plains. This leads to their extraction being done in the open, and this in turn, means that the activities of these mining operations are “in plain sight”. So this belief does not affect the incumbent women miners who can observe and learn to manage the mining operation.
Another interesting fact that I have observed in relation to alluvial mining and gender compared to other countries such as Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, is that in those countries the majority of women miners are known as baraqueras, barranquilleras, palliris, etc.
They characterize by submerging themselves in the rivers with concave trays with which they extract the gold ore that lies in the river beds to collect the ore in trays, which are transferred until the gold is obtained. In the alluvial mining of Peru that does not happen; here the most frequent roles played by women in the concessions are: owners, partners or shareholders, and cooks (they do not work collecting gold in the rivers).
With women artisanal miners at the launch of the National Network of Women in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining - RNM (Revaloro Project - Solidaridad Network)
What new developments or research related to the current state of ASM would you like to share?
I consider it important that public policies, development projects and different research on ASM have a gender focus, because the work of women miners must be made visible, in addition to deserving recognition for the responsible work they carry out in ASM and the different roles they play in leading, owning and managing mining operations.
In this sense, I believe that greater cooperation is needed to continue promoting its role and action.
The DCCSQ team from the Peru’s Ministry of Environment in one of the National Action Plan for ASM in Peru workshops.
What do you think are the greatest opportunities for innovation for ASGM?
Solve the problems of environmental impacts that are related to the slow progress of the ASM formalization process, which is trapped by the problems of expiration of concessions and overlapping of concession titles in the mining corridor. It is necessary that all the actors related to ASM: the State at all levels and instances, mining producers and their unions, civil society develop a concerted, consensual plan of action and with a budget to resolve the knots that tie this process. As a result it will be easier to differentiate illegal mining activities and take more forceful measures against them.
In addition, a specific law for alluvial mining is needed to address the problems around the commercialization of the gold value chain.
I consider that innovation proposals must contemplate not only the technological or technical aspects, but also the generation of a critical mass with responsible practices among producers that gradually gain ground in the region and thus allow changing the negative face that ASM has. Especially because it is the most important economic activity in the region (of Madre de Dios) in addition to being one of the most important regions for the production of artisanal gold in the country.
What excites you the most about the Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge: the Amazon?
I am very excited that it allows access to financing opportunities for projects with a gender perspective that have as objectives to mitigate environmental impacts, control and eradicate the advance of illegal mining in the Amazon and other criminal activities.
