RAPAPORT… Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) and the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI) released a joint policy brief, which summarized findings of several diamond digger cooperatives in Sierra Leone. The report was titled: Artisanal Diamond Cooperatives in Sierra Leone: Success or Failure?
The study was undertaken as part of a series by the groups that aims to understand the dynamics and the political economy of artisanal diamond mining.
During the period of research, Management Systems International (MSI) was contracted by USAID to manage its $6.5 million Integrated Diamond Management Program (IDMP) and its Peace Diamond Alliance (PDA) in Sierra Leone. The project aimed to formalize and rationalize the artisanal sector, and increase local beneficiation. Thirty-five cooperatives registered with the PDA in Kono District, but only five could be funded.
The project had a number of positive socio-economic outcomes for diggers: Access to employment and proper medical care; improved social status and a sense of dignity amongst member miners; income generation for women providing support services; and increased household income enabling miners to attend to their children’s education, and rehabilitate and construct houses.
Authors of the findings however point out that these benefits must be weighed against the project goals, and to the investors’ extremely low returns, which led to a cancellation of the project.
Problems that evolved were numerous from the start, the group found, in that the premise that digger supporters and middlemen “posed a problem” to the program was not a practical conclusion. “Some diggers were reluctant to abandon their relationships with supporters who provided occasional but very important financial or political assistance in times of trouble. Trying to eradicate the supporter system without alternatives was naïve and probably futile.”
Overall the project was too complex and lacked proper financing and financial flexibility to immediately address challenges on the ground. Authors found the project may have been more successful in the Tongo Field rather than Kono. Land provided for the cooperatives was unviable, and no mining experts were employed for guiding the diggers. There was inadequate monitoring of finances and some corruption was found across the program which led to misdirection of funds.
Cooperative executives were often selected due to local social status rather than merit, and members therefore were not treated equally.
These cooperatives are thought to be a solution to the problems faced by artisanal diamond miners, so the findings of this study suggested that rather than enabling members to move from dependence to independence — the effort grew into a top-down aid project. There was no sense of shared ownership in the cooperatives.
(Read the full report in PDF )
Recommendations from the work suggested that in future, organizers should keep immediate goals simple — preferably based upon the formalization of existing practices and using guidance from organizations with solid cooperative experience.
The group suggested:
–ensuring that proper guidelines and procedures are understood across all levels;
–empowering cooperative members to manage their own affairs and finances;
–providing timely financing and a contingency budget;
–training on productive and responsible mining techniques;
–prospecting scientifically and mining land that shows good potential;
–mechanizing production to minimize theft;
–monitoring programs (and monitors) across the entire system.
Additionally the group recommended recognizing alternative livelihoods to supplement miners when prices fall or diamonds are not found.
The authors posed a number of open-ended questions too: “Who owns, decides, and controls? Are the members compatible? Are members’ objectives compatible with those of project managers? How will external dependency be prevented? How can powerful people’s interests be prevented from undermining the cooperative?”
“Given the circumstances in which the PDA cooperatives were attempted, it is perhaps not surprising that the project was unsuccessful,” the authors wrote.
“Outsiders, whether donors, government or commercial enterprises, must introduce new initiatives responsibly, learning from what has gone before, taking care not to persuade people living in difficult and fragile circumstances to join ill planned efforts that may damage their livelihoods. In that sense the PDA experience has many lessons to offer.”