African women protest COP29 and organize to seek reparations from mining companies

While tens of thousands attend the U.N. COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, a group of more than 120 grassroots African female activists have snubbed the talks and already attended a “counter-COP” in Senegal. Members of the Women’s Climate Assembly (WCA) are seeking reparations for environmental and social damages inflicted by historic mining, and a greater say in the extraction of critical minerals needed for the world’s transition to clean energy. “We support an energy transition, but if it will involve children in mines, we are against it, if it involves women getting sick and being exploited, we are against it,” Oumou Koulibaly, a WCA member based in Senegal, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. At October’s African Peoples Counter COP, activists shared experiences of the harmful impacts of mining, from communities displaced by new gold mines in Burkina Faso, to water contamination from Guinea’s aluminum mines. Meanwhile in Baku on Nov. 13, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke following the conclusion of an expert panel on critical minerals. “Too often we see the mistakes of the past repeated in a stampede of greed that crushes the poor,” he said. “We see a rush for resources, with communities exploited, rights trampled, and...