Support mining-affected communities in Guinea

Background: Guinea has the world's largest reserves of bauxite, the raw material used to produce aluminum, a critical input for manufacturing electric vehicles and other technologies central to a clean energy transition. 

Unfortunately, the people of Guinea have not been benefiting from the resulting surge in demand for bauxite. With the collusion of the Guinean government, multinational corporations are extracting the country’s natural wealth with a blatant disregard for the local communities impacted by their operations.

Our Involvement: Communities in Guinea's bauxite-rich Boké region have experienced devastating loss due to large-scale mining on their ancestral lands. Inclusive Development International is supporting 13 of these communities in a mediation process with Compagnie de Bauxites de Guinea (CBG), one of the Bauxite mining companies active in the region. CBG's mine has a long history of denying the customary land rights of local communities and expropriating their farmland without compensation. CBG wants to massively expand the mine, but local communities are demanding reparations for past harm and a fairer deal that will deliver meaningful local benefits going forward.

Impact Achieved: The mediation has successfully addressed longstanding issues. The company agreed to stop dynamite blasting near villages and compensate for past damages, and has taken important steps to restore freshwater access. 

These are remarkable, but only incremental, steps in the right direction. Achieving comprehensive and effective repair for communities requires ongoing, intensive work.

What your donation can do: Meeting our $15,000 fundraising goal will help communities succeed in getting their farming land back so they can vastly improve their livelihoods and access to food. Specifically, the funds will help cover costs for the communities to effectively assess their losses and develop proposals to address complex questions of land tenure and restoration needs following decades of land-grabbing and destruction. This preparation will be essential to set the mining company on course to repair harms and respect customary land rights into the future. This is just one piece of a larger puzzle, but it is critical to success. 

We are working toward full and fair redress of harms and losses suffered, protection from future adverse impacts, and benefit sharing from the mining operation to support local community development aspirations.

Will you help us achieve this goal?