Radio Interview
Listen to a live feature interview about conflict diamonds from TVO's The Agenda (December 5, 2006) with Ian Smillie, Research Coordinator, Partnership Africa Canada.
Run time: 13 minutes.
“The Kimberley Process and the DDI are important initiatives. They affect our trade with Africa and are linked to development aspects within trade, security and the environment, in line with Swedish policy for global development.”
Ewa Björling, Minister for Foreign Trade, Sweden
Activities & Plans
After a year of preliminary discussion among NGOs, governments, labour, academics and industry, the Diamond Development Initiative was formally launched at a meeting in Accra, in October 2005. The DDI’s basic challenge is to encourage better work environments and better prices for diggers. This will involve education for miners, access to credit and artisanal mining equipment, training in diamond valuation, environmental protection, government intervention to help streamline marketing, and improved labour laws.
While the DDI can and will carry out some projects itself, its larger mandate is one of advocacy: to persuade governments, donor agencies and NGOs to engage on this issue, and to work more constructively in diamond producing regions which, ironically, are almost all much poorer than other parts of diamond producing countries. DDI will work closely with other organizations, many of which are represented on its Board of Directors or the Advisory Group: The Kimberley Process, CASM, the Fair Trade Labelling Organization, the Association for Responsible Mining, the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices, EITI and others.
The DDI has planned a number of activities which aim to introduce change to the alluvial diamond mining sector in Africa. These include:
- Research into revenue flows from mine to export, in other words “who exactly earns what”. Knowledge of who benefits most from current arrangements is important to changing them in favour of diggers. The first revealing study was published in March 2006 – Dealing for Development: the Dynamics of Diamond Marketing and Pricing in Sierra Leone. Similar research will be undertaken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo;
- Basic educational material for artisanal diggers: simple pamphlets on diamond valuation, with details on fair market prices, in French, English and local languages. These will be tested and then work-shopped with local and international NGOs in Africa in order to draw more development actors into diamond producing areas. (Many development organizations shy away from extractive industries, especially artisanal mining, because of the difficult social and economic dynamics. This project is aimed in part to give organizations the tools needed for entry-level interventions);
- Research and remedial action on the use of child miners in the diamond fields;
- Creating ‘best practice’ guidelines with respect to working with artisanal miners – for local and international NGOs, bilateral and multilateral agencies, governments, exploration and mining firms and international diamond buyers. In some way, if only by their absence, all are part of the current problems; all must be part of the solution.
The DDI is considering a number of other projects, including environmental “remediation” efforts to restore agricultural land despoiled by diamond digging.