This narrative is based on interviews conducted by Lobito Corridor field researchers. Names and identifying details have been changed. The account is preserved on our source evidence archive.
I am a woman who works in the artisanal cobalt mines outside Kolwezi. There are many of us — perhaps 30 to 40 percent of the artisanal mining workforce is female, though you would not know it from the reports written about us. In those reports, "artisanal miners" means men. Women are invisible, or we appear only as victims.
The reality is more complicated. Yes, women in ASM face dangers: sexual violence at mine sites, exposure to toxic minerals during washing and sorting, exploitation by middlemen who pay us less than they pay men for the same work. These are real problems and they need real solutions.
But we are also economic agents. I support six people — my three children, my mother, and two nieces whose parents died — with what I earn from sorting and washing cobalt ore. Before I started this work, we were destitute. My husband left. There was no other employment available to a woman with primary school education in Kolwezi. The mines offered survival.
The international organisations that study us — and there have been many, with their cameras and their questionnaires — focus on what is wrong. Child labour. Health hazards. Gender violence. These are all real. But they never ask us: what do you need to make this work safer and more dignified? They assume the answer is "stop doing this work." But stop and do what? There are no factories in Kolwezi hiring women. There are no service sector jobs. There is mining, and there is destitution. We choose mining.
What we need is what the gender analysis should recommend: safer working conditions, which means proper equipment and ventilated spaces for ore processing. Fair prices, which means breaking the exploitation chain between us and the final buyers. Child care, so women do not bring children to mine sites because they have nowhere else to leave them. Health services for the respiratory and skin conditions that ore processing causes. And representation — women in the cooperative leadership structures that negotiate with buyers and with the EGC.
The corridor can help if it creates the kind of economic opportunities that women can access — not just heavy construction jobs, but processing, logistics support, market development. If the refinery in Lobito employs women. If the corridor's economic activity creates service sector jobs in Kolwezi. If women's cooperatives can access corridor logistics to export their cobalt directly rather than selling to middlemen.
But if the corridor is just another mining project designed by men for men, it will leave us exactly where we are: working in the dust, invisible in the data, and absent from the decisions that shape our lives.
Invisible Labour
We are the women of the cobalt mines, but you will not find us in the statistics. The production reports count tonnes extracted by miners — men, mostly, who dig the tunnels and carry the ore. They do not count the women who wash the ore, who sort the grades, who carry water to the mine sites, who cook for the miners, who sell food and supplies. Our labour is essential to the mining economy but invisible to those who measure it.
I work at a washing site near Kasulo. Every morning I carry twenty litres of water from the river to the site — two trips, four kilometres total, before my work begins. I wash cobalt ore in the water, separating the mineral from the dirt using my hands and a metal basin. The water turns green from the cobalt. My hands are rough, cracked, stained. The health workers who visited last year told us the green water is toxic. They told us to wear gloves. We cannot afford gloves.
The corridor's formalisation programmes talk about "miners" as if they are all men digging tunnels. The EGC purchasing cards are issued to registered miners — overwhelmingly male. The cooperatives that are being formalised are run by men. The training programmes target male miners. Women who perform essential functions in the mining value chain are excluded from formalisation benefits because our work is categorised as "support" rather than "mining." Invisible in the statistics, invisible in the programmes, invisible in the benefits.
What would change our lives is simple: recognition. Count our labour. Include us in formalisation. Issue purchasing cards to women's cooperatives. Provide health services at washing sites. Supply protective equipment. Train women in mineral processing techniques that reduce exposure. These interventions are affordable — a fraction of what is spent on railway rehabilitation — and would improve lives for hundreds of thousands of women across the Copperbelt. The corridor's gender dimension is not a footnote; it is a measure of whether development is genuine or performative.
More Voices
A Life Along the Corridor
The corridor passes through my world but it does not stop to ask how I am. Every day I watch the changes — the surveyors with their equipment, the construction workers arriving in trucks, the officials in their vehicles with tinted windows who come and go without speaking to us. They are building something enormous, something that will change everything, and we are spectators at a transformation that will determine our future.
My community has seen change before. We have survived changes we did not choose — the colonial period, independence, the decline of the mines, the privatisation that emptied our hospitals and schools. Each change came with promises. Each change left us with less than we had before. So when the corridor people come with their presentations and their projections and their promises of jobs and development, we listen politely and believe cautiously.
What we want is simple. We want to be asked, not told. We want to be consulted before decisions are made, not informed after they are finalised. We want the wealth that flows through our community to leave some trace of its passage — a school that functions, a clinic with medicine, roads that don't become rivers when it rains. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for the minimum that justice requires when billions of dollars flow through the land where our grandparents are buried.
I tell my story not because it is unique but because it is common. Every community along the corridor has stories like mine — stories of hope and disappointment, of promises made and broken, of wealth extracted and poverty left behind. If the corridor is truly different from what came before, let it begin by listening to these stories. Not because listening is polite, but because listening is how you learn what communities actually need rather than what outsiders assume they want.
Names changed for protection. Interview preserved with source verification.