The Road to Justice for Displaced Mining Communities in the DRC

ABA ROLI's consultant conducts interviews with displaced members of the rural villages in South Kivu, DRC.

For decades, the artisanal mining industry has served as the local communities’ primary source of income. Multinational companies’ new industrial developments have pushed these groups off of their land, and denied them access to the sites that are essential to their livelihoods. As a result, the communities no longer have the economic means to support themselves, and are forced to relocate to polluted and rocky land, which cannot support their basic agricultural needs.

In response to these displacement issues, ABA ROLI worked with an extractive industries expert, Francois Lenfant, Senior Researcher and Founder of Lenfant Research , who interviewed members of the rural villages in South Kivu (pictured above) to hear their experiences with human rights violations first-hand. With the information from the interviews, ABA ROLI identified ways to defend the rights of the displaced communities by identifying the appropriate avenues of redress for the communities to pursue.