Skills Share Programme on Community Rights over Natural Resources

The 3rd Edition of the Skills Share and Learning Exchange Programme was held in Zimbabwe from the 21st -25th of September 2009. The event was hosted by the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (ZELA). The first Skills Share and Learning Exchange Programme was hosted by the Institute for Law and Environmental Governance (ILEG) in Kenya in 2007 while the second edition was held in Mozambique and hosted by Centro-Terra Viva. The programme was designed to be a forum for sharing of experiences and skills by social and environmental justice practitioners on strategies to secure community assets and rights in the natural resources sector.
The 2009 Programme in Zimbabwe was running under the theme “Securing Community Assets in Mining Communities”. It was aimed at making sure that participants get to understand and share their ideas about how best the environmental, economic, social and cultural rights of communities living in mining areas can be promoted and protected. Other participants for this years’ Skills Share included members of parliament. This was done after the realisation that there is need to take legislators on an outreach programme so that they get a better understanding of the problems being faced by communities in mining areas. It was also an opportunity to give legislators a platform to interact and share ideas with social and environmental justice activists from other countries.
The 2009 Skills Share and Learning Exchange Programme was supported by the Ford Foundation and the European Commission.
The 2009 Programme was structured in such a way that it enabled participants to meet and discuss the conceptual and practical aspects of environmental, economic, social and cultural rights during a conference. Participants also visited communities that are facing environmental and economic challenges due to mining activities in their constituencies such as Mutoko and Chiadzwa where granite mining and diamond mining activities are taking place respectively. This brief statement therefore, states the issues that were discussed during the conference meetings and the field visits.
The following key issues emerged from the conference and field visits;

• What emerged from the meetings and field visits is that the mining communities need help from human rights and social justice practitioners in the form of human rights training, capacity building for locally based or grassroots organisations and forums that can spearhead community participation in decision making processes and in claiming and demanding their rights especially against exploitation by the private sector and government in the natural resources sector. The meetings and field visits enabled social, environmental and human rights activists as well as legislators to understand the environmental, economic, social and cultural problems being caused by private and government owned companies in mining communities.
• Communities living in mining areas like Chiadzwa and Mutoko are not benefiting from mining activities being carried out in their areas and expressed the need to get economic benefits from the extraction of these resources. Some of their expectations include employment, rehabilitation of roads, schools, clinics and general infrastructure development in the community. Further, the people demanded an end to environmental degradation being caused by mining companies and the respect of their culture and traditional practices.
• In Chiadzwa the community want the government, the private companies and security forces to stop the rights violations in the area especially the restrictions on movement, the ban on public transport, the confiscation of property and the threats to relocate 4000 families from Chiadzwa to make way for mining operations. Relating to the issue of relocation the lack of information about the intention of government is of grave concern to the people, affecting greatly their development plans. 
• Members of Parliament made a commitment to summon private companies operating in Chiadzwa and Mutoko to explain the implications of their mining operations on community rights and the environment. They also committed to strongly push for the rights of communities to economically benefit from the exploitation of natural resources to be on the top of the agenda during the process of reforming the mining legislation. 
• The arrest of a participant from Kenya for contributing to debate on diamond mining in Chiadzwa during the Mutare meeting with the Chiadzwa community clearly demonstrated the difficult environment in which civil society organisations in Zimbabwe are working under. This also indicated the need for the Skill Share group to start thinking about the best ways of protecting the human rights defenders and to think creatively about how organisations working in politically charged environments can be capacitated and helped to promote and advance the environmental, economic, social and cultural rights of communities.

• It was also recommended that the Skills Share and Learning Exchange Programme should continue as it strengthens that capacity of organisations to work on environmental and social justice issues and that it provides a platform for activists to exchange and share skills and ideas gathered in the different countries. In that regard, it was resolved that networking and communication should be improved within the group as well as the use and replication of results achieved so far. The potential to expand the Skills Share Programme was also discussed and it was concluded that there is need to ensure that participants from other regions like West Africa are invited to future programmes and that other support agencies should be approached to support the programme.