Dr. Comfort Asokoro-Ogaji, Executive Director of Women in Mining Africa (WiM-Africa), has delivered a powerful message to thousands of female miners and entrepreneurs across the continent: destructive rivalry is killing progress — only collaboration can unlock the real wealth lying beneath Africa’s soil.
Speaking at the close of a week-long hybrid summit for women in Sierra Leone’s mining sector, Dr. Asokoro-Ogaji declared:
“Competition that tears us down must end today. Collaboration is the true alternative. When women fight each other, we divide our strength and delay our destiny. When we work together, we create unstoppable power that lifts the entire sector and the continent.”
Her statement, released to journalists on Monday, went further: the future of Africa’s multi-billion-dollar mining industry now hinges on women forming strategic alliances — cooperatives, joint ventures, shared equipment pools, and unified advocacy platforms — instead of scrambling over the same limited space.
In the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector — where millions of women dig daily with bare hands and borrowed tools — she insisted that functional cooperatives, collective safety protocols, and shared processing centres are the fastest route from poverty to prosperity.
“Imagine women no longer working alone in dangerous pits, but pooling money for one excavator, one crusher, one secure transport system. That is how we move from subsistence to scale,” she said.
Dr. Asokoro-Ogaji threw her full weight behind replication of WiM-Africa’s proven programmes, urging every national and community women-in-mining group to adopt the organisation’s NextGen leadership training, fellowships, and governance templates.
“We don’t want to own the space — we want to flood it with capable women leaders,” she stressed, adding that the next ten years must produce a new generation of young female CEOs, policymakers, and innovators driving ESG standards, beneficiation, and Africa-owned mineral value chains.
She also called for deliberate alignment with the African Union’s Agenda 2063, demanding that women-led enterprises, global sourcing companies, and continental bodies sit at the same table to ensure Africa stops exporting raw ore and starts exporting finished products — with women at the forefront.
Reaffirming WiM-Africa’s roadmap, she revealed the organisation is already rolling out its ambitious 2025–2030 Action Plan focused on cooperative development, access to finance, safety, and local processing.
“Unity is not a slogan — it is the strategy that will finally make Africa’s mineral wealth work for African women,” Dr. Asokoro-Ogaji concluded.
From Sierra Leone to South Africa, the message is spreading fast: the era of every woman for herself is over. The era of every woman lifting every woman has begun.
