This text is a part of our Girls and Management particular report that coincides with world occasions in March celebrating the accomplishments of ladies. This dialog has been edited and condensed.
Her personal engagement ring led Chie Murakami into a brand new line of worldwide growth work: enhancing life for miners. As founder and chief govt of Diamonds for Peace, a nongovernmental group based mostly in Japan, Ms. Murakami, 50, has been making an attempt to enhance the environmental and socio-economic situations of diamond mining communities in creating international locations, significantly Liberia. The group’s mission is threefold, Ms. Murakami stated: elevating consciousness of the problems surrounding diamond mining, serving to to assist the employees and offering emergency help within the occasion of a disaster.
What made you resolve to determine Diamonds for Peace?
I acquired my engagement ring in 2007. I didn’t know a lot about diamonds at the moment, so I searched the web on the lookout for joyful and enjoyable tales about diamonds. However I didn’t discover any of these, and I used to be shocked to find out about points like battle diamonds or baby labor. After studying these points, I began interested by what I might do utilizing my expertise in worldwide growth working in Laos, Haiti, Kenya.
Why Liberia?
I visited Sierra Leone in 2012 to see the fact after the film “Blood Diamond.” However I didn’t see a lot room for me to go in as a brand new group to do one thing. After I got here again to Japan, a Japanese good friend who used to work in Liberia as a U.N. volunteer launched me to her Liberian good friend. In 2014, he organized my journey to mining communities in Liberia so I might speak to the individuals and observe how mining was carried out. After I got here again to the Liberian capital, Monrovia, I noticed a deputy minister on the Ministry of Mines, who was main the hassle to develop a coverage to prepare all of the miners into cooperatives. As a result of I used to be interested by the truthful commerce of diamonds — and one of many conditions for truthful commerce is that employees should be organized into cooperatives or unions — I believed we had been working in the identical route.
What are some particular points affecting the artisanal mining communities in Liberia?
A serious difficulty is excessive poverty. A employee on the diamond mine solely will get round $300 a 12 months. The miners are trapped in a poverty cycle. Normally, minerals belong to the federal government, so that they should have a mining license. Whereas many miners had a license in some unspecified time in the future up to now, most of them don’t have the cash to resume it, and it implies that many of the miners are mining illicitly. As a result of they don’t have a legitimate license, they can not promote their diamonds to licensed brokers or licensed sellers, so they simply promote the diamonds to an area investor who doesn’t have a license for brokerage. After which these diamonds can get smuggled to different international locations.
The Liberian authorities estimates that about half of the diamonds produced in Liberia get smuggled to different international locations.
What are particular tasks carried out by Diamonds for Peace in Liberia?
Normally, miners mine as a result of there aren’t any different jobs for them in the neighborhood. To assist them diversify their sources of revenue, we launched beekeeping and fish farming.
In August 2020, we had our first beekeeping coaching in Weasua, Liberia. About 70 individuals participated within the coaching with specialists from a Canadian NGO, Common Outreach Basis. We did that for 2 years. It takes time to reap honey, so the beekeepers should be affected person.
Throughout that point, many individuals dropped out and we now have about 25 or 20 energetic beekeepers. The explanation we launched beekeeping is that it’s very environment friendly. As soon as beekeepers deploy the hives within the close by forest, they will care for the hives solely as soon as per week, for five or 10 minutes per hive. They simply want to wash and verify contained in the hive. That enables them to mine on the similar time.
They’ll promote honey with none drawback as a result of demand could be very excessive.
What are different steps the group has taken?
We purpose to extend information and abilities associated to diamonds and diamond mining. We did a primary two-day coaching on tough diamond grading and analysis, during which we invited representatives from 17 mining communities.
We taught them what diamonds had been used for, and that the worth is predicated on the worth of polished diamonds. We additionally present them coaching on accountable diamond mining. Many imagine the diamonds are simply discovered randomly and so they simply dig anyplace. However there’s a extra environment friendly and scientific option to discover the place diamonds could also be. In one other workshop, we taught them the best way to course of the minerals extra effectively, and to reclaim the land with the assistance of an American diamond mining specialist.
The place do the funds come from?
Primarily from grants, presently from the Japan Fund for World Surroundings.
And the fundamental coaching on tough diamond grading analysis was funded by the World Financial institution. Different particular person donors and company members are supporting us, comparable to jewellery designer Mio Harutaka.
Are there feminine miners in Liberia?
In the neighborhood we work in, now we have a number of feminine miners.. On the workshops, males are inclined to have extra resistance to what we educate. However I feel ladies are extra accepting and extra open to the brand new issues we carry.
