A women-led Congolese organisation working so that the women who live with mining, and too often pay its highest price, have a seat in deciding how the country's mineral wealth is governed.
The Dynamique des Femmes sur les Ressources Naturelles (DYFREN) was built by women of the copper-cobalt belt who refused to be counted only among mining's casualties. From Lubumbashi to Kolwezi, it brings women into the rooms where mineral revenues, contracts and community dues are decided.
Its conviction is simple: governance that leaves women out leaves the truth out. DYFREN trains women to read mining contracts and budgets, organises them into cooperatives, and turns their first-hand knowledge of mining communities into a force for transparency and accountability.
DYFREN was created by Congolese women who had spent their lives in and around mining, and seen decisions about it taken almost entirely without them. Constituted as a non-profit and led by a team of women researchers and organisers, it set out to change who speaks for mineral wealth, and who benefits from it.
Its work joins rigour and proximity. DYFREN has contributed to detailed analyses of mining revenues owed to the Congolese state, and it runs the patient, on-the-ground work of training women in extractive transparency, supporting women's mining cooperatives, and raising awareness of corruption in mineral governance.
For DYFREN, transparency and gender are not two agendas but one. Putting women at the centre of resource governance is, it argues, the surest way to make that governance honest.
DYFREN works where gender and mineral governance meet, organising, training and investigating so that women shape how resources are managed.
DYFREN trains women to read mining contracts, revenue flows and the standards meant to keep them transparent, so they can question, monitor and hold mineral governance to account.
Workshops bringing women into extractive-transparency and ITIE processes
A growing cohort of women equipped to monitor mineral governance
DYFREN works the mining provinces of Haut-Katanga and Lualaba, where most of the world's cobalt is produced and where women bear much of its cost.
Headquarters: training, research and advocacy in the capital of Haut-Katanga.
